MASARYK UNIVERSITY BRNO FACULTY OF EDUCATION

Department of English Language and Literature

Postmodernist Features in Ali Smith’s Novels

Diploma Thesis

Brno 2009

Supervisor: Written by: Mgr. Lucie Podroužková, Ph.D. Pavla Navrátilová

Declaration

Hereby I state that I have worked on this bachelor thesis by myself and that all the sources of information I have used are listed in the References.

I approve that this work is kept at Masaryk University in Brno in the library of the Faculty of Education and made available for study purposes.

In Brno, 15 April 2009 Pavla Navrátilová

2

My grateful thanks go to Mgr. Lucie Podroužková, Ph.D., who commented on my work.

3 Contents: INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………..……5 POSTMODERNISM…………………………………………………...…..….9 HOTEL WORLD………………………………………………………..…….18 THE ACCIDENTAL ………………………………………………………….35 CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………….…55 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………….……58 ELECTRONIC SOURCES ………………………………………………….58 RESUMÉ………………………………………………………………………62

4 Introduction Ali Smith has become one of the British remarkable contemporary authors whose works have successfully entered the literary world. Her novels Hotel World and The Accidental were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for fiction and the Orange Prize for fiction. However, apart from her book of short stories, only her novel Hotel World was translated in Czech language as Hotel svět . Smith claims that her novels contain the multi levelled narrative in order to guarantee the freedom of each character to tell a different story. This fragmentation of the structure of both novels, namely in Hotel World , has become the most obvious feature of her texts. I will focus in detail on this fragmentation, as a significant Postmodern attribute. I will also concentrate on women as the main characters. I will use the information from Smith’s biography to explain specific segments of the narrative. This work will deal with the feminine aspect of the novels and the connection of this aspect to Postmodernism. Ali Smith’s biography is written in a few short lines. “Ali Smith was born in Inverness, Scotland in 1962 and currently resides in Cambridge, England. After contracting chronic fatigue syndrome, she left her job as a lecturer at Strathclyde University to focus on her writing” (Flanagan). The Wikipedia offers only slightly more pregnant information about this Scottish author: She studied at Aberdeen, and then at Cambridge, for a Ph.D. that was never finished. In a 2004 interview with writing magazine Mslexia , she talked briefly about the difficulty of becoming ill with chronic fatigue syndrome for a year and how it forced her to give up her job as a lecturer at University of Strathclyde to focus on what she really wanted to do: writing. Openly gay, she has been with her partner Sarah Wood for 20 years. Ali Smith claims that reading her novels and short stories demands a cooperation from their readers: “It asks a reader to do quite a lot of work, and to participate. For me it's the thing that drives the novel form” (“Interview with Ali Smith). She explains the difference between her short stories and novels conceptions. The main distinction relates with the possibility to perceive the complexity of the characters and their worlds that are “hermetic and […] less fragmented” (“Interview with Ali Smith”). Before

5 writing Smith prepares a plan and she develops a theme connected with individual character or the particular setting in a story or in a novel: “I think I begin with a small outer or inner fact about someone, usually in his or her voice, whether 1st person or 3rd, doesn't matter” (“Interview with Ali Smith”). During the writing she often realizes that “then it does what it wants anyway, often in opposition to what imagined I wanted” (“Interview with Ali Smith”). Smith likes to focus on a typical attribute that belongs to the character and builds the plot upon it: “One little thing about them can tell me (and a reader) something about him or her and imply lots of other questions and things, which then begin to expand out of this one small thing”. One reader asks Smith about the conditions she needs for writing and she answers similarly as Virginia Woolf: “You need space that's yours”. Immediately Smith adds that “You need to open your senses out away from yourself, so you can hear and see and etc outside yourself, beyond yourself” (“Interview with Ali Smith”). Hotel World and The Accidental acquired inconsistent reactions from literary critics. Amanda Thursfield reviews Smith’s novel Hotel World and observes the system of interconnection among all five parts of the novel. She also compares the partiality of the chapters to the complexity of the world around. Similarly to the real life Smith does not reveal majority of important facts to the reader. The less important facts are exposed to the reader, the more options of the story exist. Thursfield claims that Smith possesses a “rigorous selfdiscipline in the planning process”. Simultaneously she denies that Smith is “an overdeliberate, uninspiring writer”; on the contrary Thursfield emphasises Smith’s interest in ambitious themes: “love, particularly that between women, death, loss, guilt, grief, illness, time and the chasms of misunderstanding between the generations”. These themes are variously elaborated and touched by different writers but Smith “seems to see them in a new, fresh light”. Thursfield also notices the unanswered questions that occur in Smith’s novels and which become puzzles for the reader and arouse the reader’s imagination: “Why did the girl in Hotel World fall to her death? Was it an accident or was it suicide caused by the shame of her recognition that she loved a person of the same sex?” (“Ali Smith: Critical Perspective”). Thursfield also notices how Smith plays with language “not only for its jokes, irony and double meanings, but also to give her narratives tone and psychological complexity”. Each of the characters in Hotel World speaks in her or his own language. Sara’s ghost that is gradually leaving this world also loses its human senses and abilities: “ [as she] slips away into eternity, not only do the colours that she sees and her

6 memory for physical sensations begin to fade, but so too does her verbal reasoning. She begins to forget words”. Sara’s sister expresses her “mental confusion” by swearing. Thursfield further depicts that the other two female characters in Hotel World , Else “the bag lady” and Penny, have their characteristic languages. Else possess “a rich world of inner thoughts that range from the metaphysical poets to the rules of the Winter Shelter” but she is not able to communicate because of her illness. She speaks in short abbreviated chunks of language. On the contrary Penny, a bored journalist, uses rich language but with unimportant meaning. Thursfield also highlights Smith’s interest in death and the question of what happens after death (“Ali Smith: Critical Perspective”). Steven Poole in The Guardian appreciates the way Smith managed the child’s voice in The Accidental : “the child narrator is an aspirational device for the increasingly confident writer. It's a technical summit, like Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto or a 147 break in snooker”. The credibility of Amber’ character becomes a question. “Amber quickly becomes as credible to us as she is to her halfreluctant hosts,“ claims Gail Caldwell in her article, while Michiko Kakutani who claims that Amber was “meant to stir up other people's lives — but she does not even seem credible in this limited role”. Kakutani further questions the very existence of Amber in the story: “Ms. Smith’s efforts to play up Amber's mythic qualities and to underscore the self conscious, Postmodern aspects of this story feel contrived and clumsy in the extreme” (There Enters a Stranger). Jeff Turrentine offers a completely different point of view on Amber’s occurrence in the novel: “Smith drops subtle and tantalizing hints that Amber may in fact be a projection of the Smarts’ damaged psyches, a shared delusion whose purpose is to rattle them out of their torpor and compel them to act” (“When a Stranger Calls”). Only two of Ali Smith’s literary works has been translated into Czech, the first book is a selection of her stories from her three story books: Free Love and Other Stories (1995), Other Stories and Other Stories (1999) and The Whole Story and Other Stories (2003). The Czech publication’s title is Jiné povídky a jiné povídky (2005). The other writing that was published in the Czech language was Smith’s novel Hotel World under the same title Hotel Svět (2007) . Ladislav Nagy in his review highly appreciates Smith’s work with language and her ability to condense the text into a tight mass. He also claims that much of the story is coded not into the content but into the language (Ali Smith: Hotel World).

7 The purpose of this thesis is to characterize the main aspects of Postmodernism and to show to what degree those aspects appear in the two novels I have chosen. Ali Smith’s novels The Accidental and Hotel World are the primary sources I will analyse in this thesis. The thesis contains five parts. In the first one I will start with the autobiography of Ali Smith, her attitudes toward the conceptions of her writing style, and with the goals of this thesis; the second section deals with the general overview of crucial aspects of Postmodernism and different apprehension of these aspects that I will gather from different secondary sources. The third and fourth parts focus on both novels and the level of application of the Postmodern elements in the content. They also concentrate on the role of language in Smith’s novels and its importance with regard to the Postmodern attitude towards language of a literary work. The concern is to inquire into the structure of the novel and the fragmentation of the structure. And finally the conclusion contains a brief summary of the analysis. In this work I will also comment to what extent the methods Ali Smith uses enable the text to become Postmodernist. I will show that the texts contain both the features of a traditional and of a Postmodernist novel. In this thesis I will compare the traditional approach to the structure of a novel to the Postmodernist techniques of ambiguity, insecurity and expressed doubt. The thesis will reflect the social aspect included in the novels, especially in Hotel World and marginally in The Accidentally . Finally this thesis will touch the question of the importance of social values and their influence on contemporary society. I will employ the method of a close analysis of the primary literature that I comment and try to prove the premises I have claimed above.

8 Postmodernism The unrestrained twentieth century brought prominent changes in society, technology and science: “Ideology, world war, genocide, and nuclear war entered common usage […] mass media, telecommunications, and information technology (especially the Internet) put the world’s knowledge at the disposal of nearly anyone in most industrialized societies” (“20 th century”). These revolutionary changes caused the different understanding of the role of culture and art. Realism, a leading philosophical and literary movement in the nineteenth century, was suddenly not able to shield the clashes of the new era and new opposing philosophies and cultural movements arose. Among the most significant were Modernism and later Postmodernism. Postmodernism is a literary and art movement, or rather set of ideas, beginning after the WWII (Klages). In the introduction to The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism its editor Stuart Sim claims that “Postmodernism is to be regarded as a rejection of many, if not most, of the cultural certainties on which life in the West has been structured over the last couple of centuries” (Sim). Elizabeth Ermarth offers another explanation of Postmodernism. She claims that “this term [Postmodernism] can mean almost anything” and she describes two key assumptions that characterize this literary movement. The first is the assumption that “all human systems operate like language” (Ermarth). It leads to the understanding of language as “a variety of symbolic systems, whether they involve politics, fashion, gender relations, wrestling, or money” (Ermarth). Ermarth currently presents the second assumption of Postmodernism, which presupposes that “no common denominators exist to guarantee either the Oneness of the world or the possibility of neutral or objective thought” (Ermarth). She finishes her essay with a rather ambiguous statement that “Postmodernism gets rid of ‘character’ and ‘point of view,’ but it by no means extinguishes individuality; it simply denaturalizes it and insists on its discursive function” (Ermarth). Klages explains the term Postmodernism in comparison with the ones of Modernism. She defines the main characteristics of both movements as an emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity in writing, a movement away from the apparent objectivity provided by omniscient thirdperson narrators, a blurring of distinction between genres, an emphasis on fragmented forms and discontinuous narratives, a tendency toward selfconsciousness, a rejection of formal aesthetic theories, and a

9 rejection of the distinction between “high” and “low” culture. According to Klages Postmodernism and Modernism share most of these ideas; the basic difference lays in the attitude toward these trends. While Modernism tends to lament and mourn over the fragmentation and distortion of reality, Postmodernism celebrates and enjoys this (Klages). Christopher Witcombe offers further explanation of the basic differences between Modernism and Postmodernism: The Postmodern is deliberately elusive as a concept, avoiding as much as possible the modernist desire to classify and thereby delimit, bound, and confine. Postmodernism partakes of uncertainty, insecurity, doubt, and accepts ambiguity. Whereas Modernism seeks closure in form and is concerned with conclusions, Postmodernism is open, unbounded, and concerned with process and "becoming" ("Modernism & Postmodernism"). Kershner speculates on the beginnings, reasons and sources of Postmodernism. He mentions the late fifties as a period when the Modernism according to literary critics “had more or less exhausted itself and that another movement [Postmodernism] had begun to succeed it [Modernism]”. He distinguishes two different conceptions in Postmodernist writing. One conception features the novel as a mixture of forms and genres. The author is often present in the novel and takes part in the story. The other dominating stream is represented through “a kind of fictional illusion, usually through something approximating magic realism, and foregrounds the experience of socially marginalized characters” (Kershner). Kershner also notes that an exact location of the frontier between Modernism and Postmodernism is a challenging task as numerous “historical approaches that posit postmodernism as following World War II or the cultural upheavals of the 1960s suffer because so many works that predate these watersheds (such as Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy [175967]) are arguably Postmodern in form” (Kershner). Literary pieces written in the middle of the twentieth century undoubtedly contain both Modernist and Postmodernist features and their authors are claimed to belong to both of the movements (Kershner). Ihab Hassan in his essay called “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism” doubts the term itself; he recognizes the existence of differences from the Modernist literature but simultaneously claims that the whole concept of Postmodernism “must wait upon more patient analysis, longer history” (Hassan). He also declares that “Postmodernism suffers from a certain semantic instability: that is, no clear consensus about its meaning

10 exists among scholars” (Hassan). There are no exact limiting factors that class the literary work with a literary movement. Similarly to other literary critics he compares Modernism to Postmodernism: “But if much of Modernism appears hieratic, hypotactical, and formalist, Postmodernism strikes us by contrast as playful, paratactical, and deconstructionist”. Hassan enumerates authors that “may evoke a number of related cultural tendencies a constellation of values and a repertoire of procedures and attitudes. These we call Postmodernism” (Hassan). Apart from Postmodernist authors he mentions items that belongs to Modernism and Postmodernism and correspond with each other in binary oppositions: signified vs. signifier, presence vs. absence, creation vs. deconstruction, etc. (Hassan). Binary oppositions are also mentioned in Mary Klages’ article; she claims that the system of modern societies tends to “rely on continually establishing a binary opposition between order and disorder”, then “disorder becomes the other […] anything nonwhite, non male, nonheterosexual, nonhygienic, nonrational […] becomes part of disorder, and has to be eliminated from the ordered, rational modern society” (Klages). Postmodernism does not rely on the existence of binary oppositions and is often sceptical about distinguishing “knowledge from ignorance, social progress from reversion, dominance from submission, and presence from absence” (Sim). Lewis rates a few historical and literary events to be the “inaugural and closing” (121). They are the assassination of J. F. Kennedy and the fatwa decree against Salman Rushdie, and the erection and demolition of the Berlin wall. He considerably reduces the list of the Postmodernist features. His enumeration contains the following features of Postmodernism that he regards to be the most characteristic of the Postmodernist literary work, although it is possible to find many of them in other types of contemporary writing: temporal disorder, pastiche, fragmentation, looseness of association, paranoia and vicious circles (Lewis). This point of view relatively simplifies the insight into the temporary literature and its distinction. Time in Postmodernist fiction does not represent a solid element. Postmodernist authors work with time according to their own needs as time has lost its traditionally linear function in the fiction. Temporal disorder or distortion “is a common technique in modernist fiction: fragmentation and nonlinear narratives are central features in both Modern and Postmodern literature. Temporal distortion in Postmodern fiction is used in a variety of ways, often for the sake of irony” (“Postmodern literature”). Postmodernist literature “does not just disrupt the past, but corrupts the present” (Lewis, 124).

11 Similarly Smith in her novels Hotel World and The Accidental uses time as a flexible substance. In the chapter “Postmodernism and Philosophy” Sim paraphrases Lyotard, a leading philosopher of Postmodernism, that the universal theories (grand narratives) of Western culture should be rejected “because they have now lost all their credibility” (3). Similarly Klages adds that Lyotard also rejected the existence of “grand narratives” as a direct refusal of previous literary movements. The Encyclopedia of Marxism uses Lyotard’s explanation of the term “grand narrative” that “sees some kind of interconnection between events related to one another, a succession of social systems, the gradual development of social conditions, and so on – in other words, is able in some way to make sense of history” (“Grand Narrative”). According to Lyotard people in the Postmodern period no longer believe in grand narratives that are old fashioned and oppressive (“Grand Narrative”). Klages further refers to Lyotard’s explanation of “mininarratives” that are temporary and provisional. The “mininarratives” do not claim to stability or universal truth as it is in the case of grand narratives. The Postmodernist approach to creating a text by the method of direct or indirect reference to other texts and literary genres is one of the most significant Postmodernist features called pastiche. This technique is mentioned in the article concerning the basic features of this movement: “The term ‘Postmodernist’ can be attached to almost any work that questions the boundaries and possibilities of the fictional enterprise; that attempts to collapse arbitrary borders between genres and to question what constitutes the nature of genre; that refers, directly or by allusion, to other texts” (“Postmodernism (literature)”). Ihab Hassan compares Postmodernism to Modernism and claims that Postmodernist writings unlike Modernist literature lack hierarchy and emphasize the polymorphic access to both sexes (Hassan). While Modernism tends to celebrate the “idea of ‘the family’ as central unit of social order” and the nuclear family as a model of the middleclass society, Postmodernism deals with alternative forms of family and with different views on the children’s upbringing. Heterosexual norms that are preferred in Modernism are definitely not emphasized in Postmodernism, where the access is on polysexuality and the existence of “homosocial realities in cultures” (Irving). Generally the Postmodern movement positively accepts feminist theories since Postmodernism rejects conservatism and narrowmindedness.

12 Ali Smith intensively employs the feminine issue in her prose. There are two male characters in The Accidental , Michael and Magnus, but the main accent is on the women in the novel. In Hotel World there is no significant male character. The term feminine refers to the behavioural stereotypes that are assumed as the role of women, i.e. the flexibility and subjectivity of judgement, the ability of empathy and also the unpredictability in decisions and supposed modesty and shyness. Other expected features of feminity are considered to be the abilities to control and manoeuvre in the relationships and the great amount of irrationality (“Special Features of Feminine Character”). The stereotyped masculine behavioural character carries totally different features, such as the reliability and steadiness of habits and activities. Men are believed to lack emotions in formal relationships and their utterances are more straightforward. The masculine behaviour is also generally characterized by the confidence in words and actions and the realism and practicality. The typical masculine and feminine characters are absolute opposites, but every human personality usually contains both masculine and feminine components (“Special Features of Masculine Character”). Contrary to the traditional novel the Postmodernist novel does not employ the so far established schemata of fiction that are plot, character, point of view, setting and theme. The role of a plot in a traditional novel is to challenge “intelligence and memory” as the plot consists of “a series of events” that depends one on another (Taormina). The setting of a traditional novel does not involve a mere geographical location of the story, but it indicates the time of the year and of the day, the historical and political situation, the weather and the climate. The clothing of the characters, the description of their homes and places they visit and the depiction of the important things in the characters’ lives belongs among other items of the setting (Taormina). She also claims that the “setting helps to anchor a story in a particular time and place” (Taormina). In Smith’s novels the setting indeed ‘helps to anchor’ the story but it also enables the story to reach unsuspected proportions. In Hotel World she uses the antagonist images of inhospitable street that contrasts to the hotel’s proclaimed warmth and homely atmosphere. The halfrotten leaves help to depict the atmosphere of dying while there is the halfrotten body of a young girl lying under the ground. Unpleasant and seedy places, where the story of the novel takes place, arouse the reader’s curiosity and keep them in uncertain expectation of what is coming next. In The Accidental the antagonist features are not as strong as in Hotel World but they exist and “establish the

13 plot conflict” (Taormina). One example of contrastive images is the omnipresent Coca Cola machines all over the world that serve both as a boring equipment of every little pub or as a symbol of luxury in a poor African village. Smith uses the images of a ‘substandard’ summerhouse to understand better the damaged relationships in the Smart family. The unwashed clothes Magnus wears reveal the fact that he suffers from the burden of his guilt; his mind is similarly unclean as his clothes. The theme in traditional fiction carries “the central idea or statement about life that unifies and controls the total work […] theme is the author’s way of communicating and sharing ideas” (Taormina). Smith focuses in particular on women and their destiny in the male world. The theme of The Accidental could be stated as ‘there is always opportunity to change the path of life’. Hotel World brings a different message of the time passing and our inability to change this process. John Gardner in The Art of Fiction says: A novel is like a symphony in that its closing movement echoes and resounds with all that has gone before […] Toward the close of a novel […] unexpected connections begin to surface; hidden causes become plain; life becomes, however briefly and unstably, organized; the universe reveals itself, if only for the moment, as inexorably moral; the outcome of the various characters’ actions is at last manifest; and we see the responsibility of free will (184). This definition is particularly related to the traditional mode of a novel than the mode of Modernist or Postmodernist writings. The Postmodernist literature roots in Modernism and in the avantgarde literature that culminated in the middle of the twentieth century: “It ignores such elements as plot, dialogue, linear narrative, and human interest” (“New Novel”). Both Modernist and Postmodernist writers tend to challenge the imagination and expectations of their readers and they wilfully marginalize the current literary conventions. Authors reject “the elements of entertainment, dramatic progress, and dialogue that serve to delineate character or develop plot” (“New Novel”). In Smith’s novels and stories we can hear miscellaneous motifs entwined together but the central tone is missing. In Hotel World it seems to be apparent that the head event is the fall and death of the main character but later we find out that this fall has became just an obscure reason for the characters to come into each other’s path.

14 Each woman is given a considerable space to reveal freely bits of her life and the reflections of childhood and the experiences from everyday situations. Smith does not reveal all the missing facts and circumstances that would fulfil the reader’s expectations and curiosity. On the contrary the author reduces the amount of important information to a necessary minimum. Smith balances on the verge of readability: between the understandable traditional novel and a fragmented piece of word mosaic. The Accidental offers an interesting glance at a British family. Each member of the family undergoes her or his personal crisis. The suffering and selfpity is abruptly interrupted by the arrival of Amber: somebody without past or future. Amber becomes the shocking and provoking element that brings a change into the stereotypes. The reader does not finish the book with a clear vision of the characters’ future. Perhaps the most remarkable point is Eve’s leaving the family for an uncertain reason, probably to discover herself. She takes a year off and travels around the world. A character of a traditional novel is any individual who possesses one or more physical and psychological features. The development of the European novel from the seventeenth to twentieth century showed the importance of psychological portrait of a character. However, Postmoderninst writing rejects such tendency and the characters remain flat and rather schematic (Margolin). Uri Margolin presents five elementary features typical for traditional novel characters. The first deals with the character’s existence in the story world, it “is not open to doubt; the narrator is not just playing with names and descriptive phrases, but is actually referring to such an individual”. The second important feature is the determination of the properties of the character. The third and fourth features point out that it is possible to recognize some of the qualities as the individualities of different characters are distinguishable one from another in the reality of the story and “the character’s properties at each phase of the action form an intelligible pattern of some kind”. The last but not least deals with psychological changes that the character undergoes during the story, the development or (dis)integration; these changes form the coherent pattern of the novel (Margolin). According to Margolin the realistic characters “generally fulfil all five conditions, while in Modernist novels often only the first three are met. Postmodernism undermines all five, bringing about the ‘death of the character’ as a basic representational unit”. Smith’s work with the characters of the novels evokes also other schemes than purely Postmodernist; she confronts the realistic characters with the Postmodernist reality. The clash of the approaches is most visible in The Accidental

15 where Amber, a Postmodernist flat character, enters the scene from no particular reason or a goal. Postmoderninst novel is not structured according to the traditional division: “Dramas should be complete and whole in themselves, with a beginning, a middle and an end...with all the organic unity of a living creature” (Aristotle). This process of traditional segmentation is displayed in the following graph:

(“Elements of a Novel: Structure & Plot”)

The graph clearly illustrates the traditional approach to the development of the tension throughout the storyline of the novel. The opening scene corresponds with the beginning where the author introduces the setting, the characters in the conflict and their goal. The first top on the tension curve leads the readers into the first crisis or the first plot point. This point breaks the actual layout and brings a change. The first plot point should “come as a surprise that shifts the story in a new direction and reveals that the protagonist’s life will never be the same again” (“Elements of a Novel: Structure & Plot”). This change opens the middle section of the novel. The middle leads the characters through series of minicrises and obstacles while the tension increases. The characters are given numerous challenges to overcome. The key word in the middle word is the conflict. “Conflict doesn’t mean a literal fight […] the character should alternate up and down internally between hope and disappointment as external problems begin to seem solvable then become more insurmountable than ever” (“Elements of a Novel: Structure & Plot”). The plot also contains the unexpected reversals of fortune and turns of events in order to surprise the reader. The highest top

16 of the tension curve is called the climax or the second plot point. To intensify the climax the authors often employ the ‘black’ moment, where “the stakes are highest and danger at its worst” (“Elements of a Novel: Structure & Plot”). This moment shows the hero to recover and recollect before doing the principal decision. The climax, where it becomes obvious that the goal is reachable, follows. The end brings the resolution or denouement and catharsis. The end shows how the heroes become somehow better and successful. The loose ends are tied up together and explained. The reader observes the consequences of the decision. The tension curve sharply declines as the solution comes and the peace is restored and secured (“Elements of a Novel: Structure & Plot”). Ali Smith does not depend on a simple story line that leads the readers from the beginning till the end. Instead, she uses all the characters to bring their own points of view and present their own reasons and intentions. Smith explains her approach towards the narrative when she responds to her readers’ questions on British Council website, where she touches her concept of multilayered stories and novels: “For me there's no story without voice, no voice without story, and no single story that doesn't imply another one right next to it, or behind it, or in front of it there's always another story”(“Interview with Ali Smith”). This Postmodernist approach to the novel and its characters demands a high involvement of the readers. They are not passive consumers of a served novel but active participants in the creative process of understanding the Postmodernist literature.

17 Hotel World

The time in Smith’s novel Hotel World does not flow fluently and does not follow any order even if the author directly indicates the seasons: “Here’s the story; it starts at the end. It was the height of the summer when I fell; the leaves were on the trees. Now it’s the deep of the winter (the leaves fell off long ago)” (3). Hotel World is divided into six chapters that are wittily titled according to grammar tenses. Smith plays with grammatical terms and loads them with additional meaning connected with the characters and the story. It is difficult to consider the sequences of events a story, as there are five different women consequently sharing the same space in approximately identical time. The mosaics are composed of their views, memories, experiences and thoughts that are captured in the individual chapters. The reader does not receive enough information to view the picture as a whole; instead there are bits of information that does not always relate to the story. A slight structure resemblance exists between the novels since Smith plays with the meaning of the beginning and the end ( The Accidental ) and with the present and the past ( Hotel World ). Nevertheless, Smith’s novel Hotel World does not even pretend to follow the novel structure according to Aristotle (see “Postmodernism”). Instead of transparent and comprehensible system of chapters in a logical order it is sectioned into a completely different frame. Smith uses grammatical terms to imply the colour of the chapter and this allegory invites the reader to reveal the contents of the particular chapter. The titles of the chapters partially share the unity with the time, since the grammatical tenses possess the feature of a direct connection with time. The titles of the chapters are called: “Past”, “Present Historic”, “Future Conditional”, “Perfect”, “Future in the Past” and “Present”. The chapters “Past” and “Future in the Past” are related directly to Sara’s fall: in the “Past” it is Sara’s ghost herself searching for details of her own death, while in the “Future in the Past” it is Sara’s sister Clare who occupies her mind with the investigation of her sister’s death. The structures of Smith’s novels share a similar feature of framing. The character of Amber interconnects The Accidental while Hotel World starts and begins with Sara’s story. Also the titles of the chapters in both novels reflect the aspect of time. Hotel World chaptering allows the reader to be puzzled by the titles; the arrangement in The Accidental seems less complicated but the parts are further separated into minor sections that are closely devoted to particular characters.

18 Wikipedia offers a simple definition of the past tense that it “is a verb tense expressing action, activity, state or being in the past of the current moment” (“Past tense”). The identically called first chapter refers to the fact that Sara is dead and simultaneously still exists in a kind of a dual coexistence of her ghost and half rotten body. Smith tries to express how the past markedly influences the present; she highlights that although there is no exact dividing line between the past and the present some crucial events from the past evidently influence the present. Sara’s ghost moves around her family and the hotel and almost uselessly tries to draw the attention: “hoooooooo I have a message for you […] Here’s a woman […] welldressed […] Her life could be about to change […] Here’s another […] wearing the uniform […] She is ill and she doesn’t know it yet. Life, about change” (30). The other chapter, where Smith narrates the story in firstperson, is the part devoted to Sara’s sister Clare. The tense that is in the title of this chapter “Future in the Past” is defined to be “used to express the idea that in the past you thought something would happen in the future” (“Future in the Past”). The interpretation of the tense corresponds with the content, because Clare often speculates on her sister’s possible progression as a first class swimmer: “I haven’t told a soul sub that means substitute imagine Sara my sister Sara Wilby might have been a sub for a national team that is fucking amazing really” (186). The title concisely comments its content: the irreversible fact that Sara is dead and the fruitless hopes about her once possible future are juxtaposed together in a kind of a controversial composition. The chapter of the young homeless woman Else is called “Present Historic”, which is a tense “that narrates past events: the present tense used to narrate actions that happened in the past to make them seem more vivid” (“Historic Present”). The chapter is written in the thirdperson subjective mode, where the character’s thoughts are revealed through the narrator: “People go past. They don’t see Else, or decide not to. Else watches them. They hold mobile phones to their ears and it is as if they are holding the sides of their faces and heads in a new kind of agony” (39). The reason why Smith entitles this chapter by a tense that pretends to be current clarifies the hopeless situation of the woman. There is no future for Else, she abandoned her past and the present does not exist (see “Postmodernism”). Else survives on the street with her thoughts and animal instincts. She only occasionally reveals fragments from her childhood and early adulthood and she never explains the reasons of her present condition: “That postcard,

19 though it got folded and creased, that she’d sent her mother and father when she went to Venice” (7778). Smith simply calls the chapter that is devoted to Lise “Future Conditional”; however, she does not distinguish whether it is the Future Real or Unreal Conditional tense. Since the Future Unreal Conditional is not “as common as the Future Real Conditional because English speakers often leave open the possibility that anything might happen in the future” (“Future Conditionals”) it is assumed that the title “Future Conditional” refers to the Real case: “The Future Real Conditional describes what you think you will do in a specific situation in the future […] you do not know what will happen in the future […] It is called ‘real’ because it is still possible that the action might occur in the future” (“Future Conditionals”). Lise is ill and unable to move around, and since her doctor does not know the source of her illness, he has asked her to fill in a form concerning the symptoms and her feelings. The form becomes an unbeatable obstruction for Lise; the booklet becomes the whole plot of this chapter apart from reflections from the hotel where Lise has worked before her illness (see “Postmodernism”). During the chapter Lise plans to find the pen, read and fill in the form, which she is never able to do properly. The title of the chapter “Perfect” evokes smoothness and firstclass things. Penny, its main character considers herself to be the first class and perfect. “The perfect aspect is formed in English by conjugating the verb ‘to have’ and then appending the active verb’s past participle” (“Perfect aspect”). The existence of the verb ‘have’ produces an unsuspected proportion of the verb. The comparison of Penny and the other women in the novel brings a discovery of things that Penny ‘has’: she possesses social status, life, money, and friends that she meets at the parties. The title also corresponds with her work and with the adjectives she uses for the description of the hotel and its services: “Classic Ideal Flawless, the computer screen said” (125). The title also hides rather considerable portion of superficiality that is closely connected with Penny and her lifestyle. The last chapter of the book “Present” does not bring any resolution or a denouement, and the loose ends are not tied up. Instead the reader is offered a lyrical and distant description of an autumn morning with elements of ‘the other world’ that coexists with ‘our’ reality. The text is narrated from the objective thirdperson perspective: “This point of view can be described as ‘a fly on the wall’ or ‘the lens of a camera’ that can only record the observable actions, but cannot relay what thoughts are

20 going through the minds of the characters” (“Narrative mode”). The layout of the last pages of the chapter is rather playful and returns the reader to the very beginning of the novel. The font size of the few last words of the book diminishes as if Sara’s ghost is finally able to leave its body and the world: “Don’t you have a home to go to? Aren’t you supposed to go to heaven, or hell, or somewhere?” (26). The last ‘word’ of the novel is written on a blank page that has no number at the bottom in a diminishing font size: “Wooooohoooooooooo” (238?). The same acoustic word opens the first chapter “Past”. Similarly the following seven pages do not have numbers and are completely blank (see “Postmodernism”). The content of each chapter evidences fragments of feelings, sentences torn from conversations, and unimportant details that somehow contribute to the overall mosaic spirit of the story. It can be claimed that Hotel World is not a proper novel but a collection of entangled stories about women, told entirely by women and dedicated to women (see “Postmodernism”). Raymond Federman compares the Postmodernist literary characters to their realistic precursors. He claims that “the people of fiction, the fictitious beings, will also no longer be wellmade characters who carry with them a fixed identity” (Federman). The women in Hotel World partially correspond with Federman’s description of a typical Postmodernist character, but in some situations the characters possess rather realistic features. Hotel World starts with the death of one of the main characters, Sara. Since she physically does not exist, Smith employs Sara’s ghost to enter the plot. Yet Hotel World cannot be indicated as a pure ghost story because Sara’s ghost was not created to frighten the reader (“Ghost Story”). On the contrary, Sara’s ghost serves to inform and explain her sensations and memories. The conception of Sara’s ghost betrays the Postmodernist approach since the ghost exists and functions as a proper character of the plot: “The creatures of the new fiction will be as changeable, as illusory, as nameless, as unnameable, as fraudulent, as unpredictable as the discourse that makes them” (Federman). Smith begins the book by a transcription of a fatal sound. She uses the sound of Sara’s mortal fall to open her story: “Woooooooo – hooooooo what a fall what a soar what a plummet what a dash into dark into light…” (3). By the multiple repetition of ‘what a’ sentences author skilfully describes Sara’s last experiences. There is no pain just the taste of the enormous speed of the fall. During the first chapter “Past” Sara’s ghost again and again recalls the details of the fall. The fall is one of the language

21 constructs and images and symbols, which does not have any necessary validity (Lye) and it also reflects the Postmodern feature of recycling of the same image in the same text (Irving). Sara’s ghost also vehemently expresses her desire to live and use her senses again: “What I want more than anything in the world is to have a stone in my shoe” (3) and later in the text: “I would give anything to taste. To taste just dust” (5). Sara’s ghost depicts its changed perception of the world and her failing memory: “Today even the sun was colourless, and the sky […] I will miss smell […] I will miss hearing a song […] Seeing birds. Their wings. Their beady . The things they see with” (8). Sara’s identity uncontrollably disintegrates and her senses do not function. This decline points to the Postmodernist approach towards the reality. The Postmodernist character loses the ability to recognise the world and its rules (Irving). Her ghost impersonally draws the details of her funeral and the portraits of her parents and sister: “I chose the saddest people and I followed them to see where we’d lived” (10). There the ghost succeeds to manifest herself to her parents and sister for several times: “I came only twice to the mother. It made her cry, made her miserable, jumpy and fearful. It was unpleasant” (13). The emotionless, nearly ironic account of the feelings in the family after Sara’s funeral carries an interesting element of hidden information. Sadness is literally tangible. Sara’s father decides to close his mind: “A wall crept inches higher from his shoulders round his head; every time I came the added a new layer of bricks to the top of it” (13). The most interesting observation involves her sister: “She had a fracture of anger starting under her yellow hairline, crossing her forehead and running right down the middle of her face dividing her chin her neck, her chest, all the way to her abdomen where it snarled itself into a black knot. This knot only just held the two halves of her together” (11). The ghost is not interested in the reasons why Sara’s sister suffers from her anger, she prefers watching her: “I looked at the cracked face of the sad girl and knew. In the face of so much meaning it is easier to have no face” (14). Sara’s ghost blends the abstract and concrete perception; she transforms the image into reality and redefines it into a new Postmodernist concept. Postmodernism prefers watching films and surfing on the Internet to real life (Irving). Sara’s ability to understand Clare’s undergoing agony is paralysed and it is reduced to mere watching. Postmodernism stresses “a greater emphasis on the body, on the human as incarnate, as physical beings in a physical world. This is tied to Postmodernism's

22 distrust of rationalism” (Lye). Not only does Sara’s ghost become a kind of narrator of the story, but it also tries to communicate with its former body that is “under the ground, in the cold, in the rich small smells of soil and wood […] Knock knock. Wooo hoooo’s there? Me. You woooohoooo?” (910). The reader is confronted not only with the vivid picture of “broken and rotting” body (15), but also witnesses a real inner dialogue between the two selves, between the spirit and the body: “Your sister planted crocuses above your head last week, did you know? Who? she said. What? Fuck off. Leave me alone. I’m dead, for God’s sake” (15). The spirit forces the body to explain all the circumstances of the fall, which are rather ironic: “On my first night a boy working on Room Service said he’d show me the ropes […] He was putting the dishes into the dumb waiter […] I bet you a fiver I can fit myself in [the dumb waiter] there” (25). Although the result of the bet is tragic, the explanation is playful and not depressive (see “Postmodernism”). Postmodernism challenges the seriousness and prefers the irony and playfulness (Irving). After the story is told the body refuses to communicate with the ghost: “Aren’t you supposed to go to heaven, or hell, or somewhere? […] Go away” (26). The body wishes to complete the process of dissolution with the spirit and surprisingly does not want to exist any more. The spirit wishes to live but misses the senses that belong to the body. The fact disables the coexistence of the body and the spirit and each of them is left to the gradual decay and departure to their own ‘worlds’. This relates to the Postmodernist challenge to social taboos (Irving). The fragmented existence of the main character enables Smith to extend the story into an unexpected space and to enter the story with her voice: “– and here’s the story, since you’re so desperate for one” (17). Here Smith alludes to the traditional conception of a novel with the beginning, the middle and the end (see “Postmodernism”). Despite her proclamation Smith does not follow the approach and she recycles the images and words to create a collage of different fragments. During their last meeting the body recalls the most important event in the last days before the fatal fall. It recalls another fall, a fall in love: “I couldn’t help it. I fell. She sells watches, all different kinds, and watch straps, and watch batteries” (1718). It also retrospects the discovery of her sexuality: “I had been thinking about what the girl in the watch shop’s body would look like if it didn’t have any clothes on it. It was the first time I had ever, ever thought such a thing” (22). Simultaneously Sara knew exactly “what people who knew me would think” (23). Sara started to follow the girl from the watch shop: “I did this for three weeks of working days, including Saturdays. Her day

23 off varied. Her lunch hour varied. It could be anywhere between half past eleven and four o’clock. Every day of the third week she had her lunchhour at half past twelve” (23). Postmodernism apart from Modernism does not prefer the heterosexuality but deals with other than “unified sexualities” (Irving). Smith does not hide the fact that she is a homosexual and she inserts and emphasizes this aspect in all her literary works. Words delivered by Sara’s ghost: “Remember you must live,“ (27) relate in various ways to Muriel Spark’s quotation stated as one of the mottos at the beginning of Smith’s novel. In Spark’s book Memento Mori , one person after another in a close circle of friends gets a mysterious phone call with a simple message: “Remember, you must die” (“Muriel Spark”). This allusion to Spark’s novel provokes an unavoidable comparison of the settings (see “Postmodernism”). While in Memento Mori the recipients of the message are alive and elderly people, Sara’s ghost says the message to “the sparrow and the empty pool” (27). Smith further readapts the quotation in playful ways: “Remember you must leave” (28) and “Remember you most love. Remember you mist leaf” (30). This Postmodern playfulness and lightness (see “Postmodernism”) is deliberately used to describe the missing mind of Sara’s ghost in this world, her “hanging falling breaking between this word and the next” (31). John Mepham in his essay Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction “suggests that the best image for the Postmodernist text is the Labyrinth” (Mepham). Further he explains the term: “The text […] is replaced by textuality, often figured by the metaphor of the labyrinth [image of the text] produced by the endless play of signifiers” (Mepham). These elements are visible in the last chapter “Present”, which does not contain any plot; instead there is a lyrical depiction of an autumn morning told by an unknown narrator. The narrator describes the garden with its colours, smells and life: “There are little flies suspended in the air, new and reckless. The feverfew is green” (225). The narrator also ironically notices hundreds of ghosts of dead people, ghosts of ordinary women around the supermarkets and their “eternally impatient” husbands waiting for them (226), a ghost of a Mrs M. Reid, a former proud owner of a stationary shop that she could start only after death of her unloved husband “because it would embarrass him” (227). Yet Smith also involves names of wellknown people that somehow suffered during their lives. There is a “ghost of a rose” Diana Spencer whose face is being sold “in the many souvenir shops” (228) and a ghost of a child actor, Solomon Pavy who died in 1602 and who still “is loitering in the reconstructed Globe Theatre” (228), and a ghost of Dusty Springfield, a “popular singer of the nineteen

24 sixties” (229). Finally the narrator takes note of the girl from the watch shop who wears Sara’s watch and recalls being followed: “She wasn’t ready. The timing was wrong […] It’s embarrassing now, when she thinks about it, and when she does she can feel small wings moving against her chest, or something in there anyway, turning, tightened, working” (235). The playful paraphrases of Spark’s famous quotation from Memento Mori written on a separate page in the form of a poem close the whole novel: “remember / you / must / live // remember / you / most / love // remember /you / mist / leaf” (237). These lines recommend Sara and her ghost that they leave this world and say goodbye to the living. This effort of maintaining an order does not belong to the Postmodernist features. It refers to the Modernist novel where the order and hierarchy are the aims of the literary work. The Postmodernism prefers the fragmentation and loss of centralised power (Irving). Else, another character in the novel, spends days in front of the Global Hotel, begging money from the passersby. The reader is offered the chance to observe her thoughts, her rich inner world. Smith purposely juxtaposes Else’s existence with her knowledge in order to surprise the reader: “The library here in this town is good […] It stays open longer, generally, and the librarians rarely throw anybody out, even somebody getting some sleep […] She has been reading metaphysical poets […] Else also likes William Butler Yeats” (50). The comic fact that Else is forced to educate herself partially against her will is ironic. The underestimation of education, which is traditionally considered as an important social value, and the irony of the way of Else’s education, belongs among the main Postmodernist features (Irving). Else perceives time (see “Postmodernism”) through the changes of the light: “Dusk has already happened; the street between the buildings is lit by streetlights and the lights from the hotel front, the shop lights and the lights on passing cars” (36) and weather: “Winterdark, wintercold, winterempty town. The streets have emptied” (65). Similarly to Sara’s ghost that forgets words and loses her senses, Else “can’t remember which hand means which on a clock whether it’s the short one that means the minutes or the long one that does” (45). This fact that Else does not have the basic knowledge refers to the Postmodernist feature of paralysis and decay. Else describes her state of health in an interesting way, as she treats her illness as something alien that exists independently inside her body: “Inside her, another wall holding her upright […] made of phlegm, and occasionally […] when she has to cough, can’t stop herself, the wall crumbles. She imagines it breaking like rotten cement” (40).

25 Hotel World possesses a substantial proportion of social point of view. Smith emphasizes the inequality of the poorest represented by Else, who is described as a victim. She recalls how their neighbour abused her at the age of fourteen. A TV programme for children accompanied the act of raping and Else compared herself to a broken puppet from a fairy tale: “I had strings, but now they’re gone, she thinks. There are no strings on me” (61). She also has a nightmare which reflects her childhood: “She enters a room whose walls are lined with wardrobes […] Each piece of clothing has been made for Else […] and each of them is useless […] the wardrobes go on forever packed with unwearable love” (4849). Else receive offers of sex that has become a source of living apart from begging: “Ah, love. Else, laughing her guts out now, knows it well. Members of the public, for instance, are always asking her for it, as if it’s part of her job to give it out to them for their small change” (53). When a uniform occurs nearby the instincts make her react in a primitive way: “Else stops, midcough. She becomes completely still. She has seen spiders and woodlice to the same thing. She is good at it” (54). Else remembers one morning when “Ade [her boyfriend at that time] breathing at her ear, and watch as the sun moves its white light across the two pairs of boots. She will remember it, that morning, that sun, those boots, as one of the times in her life when she was completely happy” (62). The words Else uses when she asks for money are always written in shorthand and put into brackets: “(Cn y spr sm chn? Thnk y)” (36). The brackets symbolize the unimportance of what has been said, the unavoidable interruption of Else’s stream of thoughts and memories. They also express the enormous painful effort to speak as the illness occupies the majority of Else’s strength. Else feels unimportant and this feeling is expressed in the way she speaks. Her speech became paralysed and fragmented since Else scarcely uses her voice. The word ‘world’ that is used in the title of the novel can be perceived in two different ways. The first is a general, global view that understands the world as an integrating reality connects all people together. All the women in the novel live in the same world, in the same time and in the same town. While the other sense of the word means that each of the characters exists in their own space and follows their own rules. Their personal worlds are linked with the name of the hotel, the Global Hotel, and correspond with its motto: “All over the world […] we think the world of you” (56). Else’s world is the street: “So many of the things on the street were close to people, intimate with them, even inside their mouths, before they ended up here” (56). The

26 description of the hotel building is in contradiction with “The rules of the Winter Shelter” (65). The receptionist from the hotel has invited her to spend a night at the hotel for free and Else decides to accept the offer: “She is walking on carpet that sinks like gracious mud” (68). When Else enters her hotel room, she does not feel safe: “They’re just taps. They’re just stupid fucking taps […] She has decided against using the towels; they are too white […] she dries herself down on her jumper” (75). In the comfort of the hotel Else recalls a situation when a journalist asked to take her possessions out of her pockets and photographed her things lying on the pavement. This photograph appeared later in the local newspaper. She recalls how she felt important then. The importance of media that represent the only reality belongs among one of Postmodernist significant features. Media substitute people’s emotions and shift the perception of the world (Irving). The title of the chapter “Perfect” can be understood in different ways. Perfection is the aim that Penny desires to reach, and this desire determines her appearance and behaviour, her need to be admired and appreciated. In a negative sense “Perfect” relates to her intolerance of other ‘less perfect’ people. The short time of one night helps to reveal her superficiality and emptiness. She is interested in Else and her life until she finds out that Else is a homeless person who takes drugs. After Penny meets Else in the hotel, at first she supposes her to be an eccentric rich woman, but later she changes her opinion: “Penny wouldn’t want to offend the woman in case the woman was somebody. The woman could be anybody […] I’m an idiot, Penny was thinking. I’m such an idiot. Look. The coat. The money. The bad skin, the smell, the listless readiness” (151,171). Another meaning of the “Perfect” is connected to the hotel that offers perfection to pretend homely atmosphere, but the reality does not correspond with this intention as some chambermaids “had a practice of wiping down the toilet seats of exceptionally messy rooms with the face flannels of guests […] spitting […] into roomservice food” (9596). Penny is definitely the socially contrastive character to Else. Penny devotes her time entirely to work, travelling and visiting hotels, writing reviews and making social contacts useful for her job. Her personal life does not exist; she does not have a family or close friends. Her lack of emotions leads her to watching a porn channel on the hotel TV: “Her mouth fell slowly open. She screwed up her eyes. As if it knew she was watching it, as if it had been waiting for her to, the channel crypted over” (125). While Else daily experiences the harsh side of life, Penny fulfils her life with false stories to

27 make her existence less boring: “She was bored out of her mind […] But if it [computer] was broken, it might make a good story” (131). She imagines herself to be questioned by her party friends about the story she has schemed out: “(Penny, weren’t you terrified?) I was, completely terrified […] I’d broken it [computer] over the head of a seventeenyearold thug. (Laughter, someone saying knockout , applause, congratulations, appreciative coughing” (132). The scheme of the fictitious dialogue evokes a TV interview. Smith uses the image of an interview to highlight Penny’s hollow life. The only aim of her effort is to make an impression. Penny and Else seem to live a real life only in media world. This feature is related to the Postmodernist attribute of the importance of media (Irving). The worst disaster that can happen to Penny is to lose the words she has typed: “They were completely gone. Damn. She would have to start again” (134). Penny’s thoughts are dark and pessimistic. She sees dead and alive animals “humming and hissing it, Hey, you! We’re not dead! Don’t call us dead!” (129). A similar pun dealing with Sara’s ghost occurs in this chapter and in the first and last chapters, but the message differs: “Remember you must die. Remember you must diet” (129). The pun illustrates the Postmodernist approach to the text that shows the unimportance of content while the main emphasis is in the textuality and in the playfulness with the words. In the corridor of the hotel Penny meets Clare, Sara’s sister, under absurd circumstances when Clare tries to find the place where used to be the dumb waiter. But the dumb waiter was dismantled and the hole was covered by a panel and secured with screws after Sara’s death. Clare is desperate and asks Penny for help to uncover the hole. Penny agrees and she thinks that the “girl will always remember me as the nice person who helped her the night she was, was, doing whatever it is she’s doing” (138). The absurdity of the situation is visible in two ways. Neither Penny nor Else asks Clare about the reason of her doing. Clare evidently destroys the hotel property and behaves in a rather strange way: “Perhaps she’d been sent up here to do a job and would be reprimanded if she didn’t do it and was frightened to go downstairs having not done it” (137). The other absurd fact is that Penny ‘the perfect’ asks Else for help; she incidentally knocks on Else’s room and asks her to lend Clare some coins to unscrew the cover: “Come on, she said. Come up with me, it’ll be fun. It makes a change, fun at work. I’m Penny. You are? I am what? the woman in the coat said. Penny roared with laughter” (141). After they succeed to unscrew the panel and they see the long shaft,

28 Penny and Else react in different ways: “But there’s absolutely nothing there, Penny said. Deep, the woman in the coat said” (144). After making a hole into the wall Clare starts to throw coins and other subjects into the shaft in order to learn how much time the fall lasts, but after all the effort was dedicated to open the space, nobody has the watch to measure the time in seconds. The situation when Clare is making a hole into the wall creates the background for the confrontation of Penny and Else. Smith does not allow Penny to become anyhow efficient. Penny remains needless, empty and yet longs to be filled by other people’s stories. Penny uses the people she meets as sources of her own life: “There was a story here somewhere. Penny could sense it, feel it, as if halfremembered. She was on to something. She persevered” (154155). Penny joins Else and they walk along the night streets together. Else heads for the houses in the suburb where she can see inside through the windows and together they observe bits of life of the tenants: “Each time they found a window whose curtains were open and whose lights were on, the woman [Else] stopped outside it and stood by the gate where she could see” (158). The bits compose a mosaic of short sequences: “The women sewing, leaning on their hands, and the TV pictures flickering like open fires in their sitting rooms. The men delicately placing cigarettes between their lips, or asleep, network light shifting on their faces […] reflected in the reflections of the rooms they lived in” (162). Penny in “Perfect” works as a journalist for a newspaper that is called The World on Sunday . The title of the newspaper evokes the Biblical seventh day when the God rested after creating the world. The peaceful brightness and chastity reflect the Sunday’s festivity. Nevertheless, neither of the women is able to reach the Sunday world. Penny says that the Sunday does not have any colour for her: “It’s full of grey space. Since I’m being truthful” (169). Else has already lost all the connections and hopes to feel the Sunday spirit. Postmodernist characters lose hope and do not trust in traditional values like the God. All traditions lack their importance and the only valuable reality exists today (Irving). Penny parasites on other people’s emotions because she is unable to produce her own: “I’d say, actually I’m an orphan , and watch their faces, it was kind of fun, seeing such immediate discomfort […] it makes them see me as vulnerable, needing special care” (166). She attacks Else’s feelings with her lies and fictitious confessions in order to constrain Else to trust her: “The woman looked at Penny, sympathetic. Penny looked dolefully back. Sex, she thought behind the doleful face. If the stealing doesn’t do it,

29 and the myparentsdidn’tunderstandme, then the sex, the sex always does” (168). Penny’s enormous effort brings its fruit as Else breaks her silence; she begins to speak in proper sentences. But when Penny realizes that Else is a homeless woman, she does not listen to her: “The woman was talking. I’m sorry? Penny said. Things, the woman said. If you touch them, like. Ruined” (171). Smith does not allow the reader to learn enough information to find out the reasons why Else lives on the street. Before they part Penny unexpectedly decides to write a cheque to Else she suddenly feels different: “Penny slipped the folded cheque inside the woman’s coat pocket, tucked it in, patted it. She forgot about her ruined boots. Her heart rose, flew about; her heart was like a bird, ecstatic, high above her head” (173). After Penny arrives at her hotel room she goes over the events of the evening. She has entered for a very short time Else’s world, but after she returns to her world, she decides to cancel the cheque and cancel her emotions. She feels satisfied that “something inside her which had been forced open had sealed up again […] If you were poor, you were poor. You couldn’t handle money […] it must be a relief, to have none” (178). The chapter “Future in the Past” is devoted to the fifteen years old Sara’s sister Clare. She has always been partially neglected growing up next to her successful sister: “I remember a friend of mum’s saying you should teach your little sister to swim too Sara […] everyone laughing & him giving me that look” (196). The main theme of this chapter is Clare’s desperate search for an answer to her question. The question that haunts her in her dreams is whether or not her sister committed suicide. Clare reflects the how differently her parents accept or refuse the fact that Sara is dead: “half the wardrobe empty […] my stuff all spread out across the rail to make it look like nothing was taken away but all her stuff was taken away” (192). Father’s sorrow has turned into anger and he has thrown away all Sara’s trophies from swimming races: “I picked it all out […] put it all down on the carpet he went fucking mad ballistic he was a man needing a lobotomy” (192193). Mother is “completely out of it going round like she’s a ghost herself all the time getting that stuff from the doctor […] her not eating anything not seeing anything not hearing anything” (193194). The diary style enables the reader to perceive Clare’s shaken mind. The chapter starts with Clare’s arrival from the hotel where she has broken into the dumb waiter shaft in order to measure the time of the fall. Clare show us through the time shortly after Sara’s death when Clare felt “every night ever since then since that night it has been the bits of her coming at me like they are all demanding I never know what” (187).

30 Clare’s parents are emotionally paralysed and afraid to love their younger daughter and she feels abandoned. Clare also cannot handle the interest people show to her: “Mrs Johnstone from up the road stopping me on the way to school telling me I understand what your are feeling holding that psycho way on to my arm” (199). Clare is deeply irritated by her classmates who assume that her sister committed suicide. She compares her life to reading a book: “you were half way through it really into the story knowing all about the characters […] then you turn the next page over & halfway down the page it just goes blank” (190). Before Clare summons the courage to enter the hotel, she comes to the street and sits opposite the building. Passersby consider Clare to be a runaway girl and throw her money. Else stays on her place next to the hotel and perceives Clare as a trespasser into her territory. Clare seems to mirror Else’s previous life. The comparison of the two young women sitting on the street evokes the Postmodernist concept of decentralised lives. Characters in Postmodernist writing lack the sense and goal of their lives and depend on chance (Irving). In the hotel Clare meets Sara’s colleague: “this man told me it was by accident for definite he was actually there he saw it because she was meant to be on the same shift as him all week” (194). The discovery of the fact that Sara did not mean to die brings her sister a relief: “for one fucking minute I had forgotten what it was I was supposed to be feeling” (207). Clare knows that Sara did not commit suicide but she does not know what to do with this fact since her parents are convinced that their older daughter died deliberately: “I tell mum & dad but I can’t can I I can’t just like say it over the tea things” (194). The reality perceived by Clare ( Hotel World ) and Astrid ( The Accidental ) is truthfully and skilfully recorded. Clare’s pages in the novel are written in a diary style, with no punctuation or paragraphing of the text (see “Postmodernism”). The only symbol that serves the reader to orientate in the text is the ‘&’ sign. This single symbol substitutes connecting words, question and exclamation marks. Together with application of ‘&’ symbol Smith uses other devices of leaving out words, putting words together and frequent repetition. These elements express and highlight the difficulties that Clare is forced to face: “it’s been ClareWilby’ssister didherselfin ClareWilby’ssister didherselfin those fucking wankheads at the north gate shouting it when I went past on the other side of the road & now I know she didn’t” (Hotel World, 194). This fragmented style of a text is typical for Postmodernist writing (Lewis).

31 Lise in “Future Conditional” is perhaps the most puzzling woman in the novel, because there is no counterpart to her character. While Else is confronted with Penny, Clare compares herself with her sister, and Sara’s ghost appears whenever and wherever she wishes, Lise stays in isolation. Eventually, Lise’s own former self becomes her counterpart, as her life is perceived in two ways. Lise as a hotel receptionist where she has worked for eighteen months and the other is Lise as an ill person who spends all her time in bed. The difference is obvious. The illness, which stays unknown for the reader, has erased the minutes and hours, days and weeks. Her time (see “Postmodernism”) is measured by her mother’s arrivals and departures while Lise sleeps. “How many minutes were there in an hour? […] How many hours in a day, and weeks in a year? That was the kind of thing children knew” (81). At work she used to follow the time punctually: “The clock on the computer reads 6:51 p.m., but at the very moment she glances at it the black 1 changes to a 2. 6:52 p.m.” (101). The time does not flow steadily and becomes one of the main dimensions of the story. The Postmodernist time is fragmented and reshaped according to the needs of the author (Lewis). The whole chapter starts with Lise’s effort to complete a form: “In a minute she would sit up. Then after she had recovered from sitting up she would try to find the pencil in the folds of the bedclothes, and then she would write the words on the form” (81). The struggle to complete the form, which contains questions dealing with her health, becomes an unmanageable task threading the chapter together from the beginning till the end. Smith compares Lise’s constant state of mental passivity to a work that is frozen in the middle of activity. Her “thoughts were slowly unearthing in her brain, like turf being turned up by someone she could make out only on the distant horizon, on the edge of a waiting field, a person made so small by distance and so slowed with age or weariness that he or she could hardly wield the spade” (83). Lise’s sense perception and brain activity become limited by her illness. The author enters the story in this chapter more visibly as the conarrator. Lise’s illness offers Smith a greater space to present her narrative. Smith questions herself about the purpose of writing when Lise is not able to act as the main character. There she also questions the Postmodernist and nonPostmodernist approaches towards fiction. The Postmodernist authors claim that story has lost its significance: “Lise was lying in bed. That was practically all the story there was” (81). The fact that the author not only enters the story but also comments on the plot refers to one of the most significant Postmodernist feature that is called a vicious circle (see “Postmodernism”).

32 The real world permeates the fictional (Lewis). Smith further describes the situation as “a place of space, of no apparent narrative. Nothing could be possible there. Nothing could happen there, for a while” (84). Deirdre, Lise’s mother, mentions the same helplessness again at the end of the chapter: “She watched the nothing happening in the room” (122). Finally Smith admits that “there was a story after all, somewhere, insistent, strung between this place and the last and the next” but now there is none only a voice in Lise’s head singing an old advertisement song (8485). Paradoxically this declaration goes against the Postmodernist style of writing, there Smith confirms that the story is able to survive. Lise’s mother Deirdre used to be a pop singer twenty years ago and she “had done a tour of regional theatres, [and] she had signed many albums for smiling pensioners” (91). Deirdre has already lost hope and feels useless “but Lise being ill had made her happy […] like a heroine of a middleclass sitcom” (91). Her daughter’s illness has brought inspiration to Deirdre and she starts to write an epic poem called “Hotel World”. The poem becomes the symbol of Lise’s illness, the reason why her mother comes to Lise: “it allowed for a good long illness. But the point is, the point is, Deirdre would come […] Even in the timeless zone of the average day of an unwell person invisible to the rest of the fastmoving world there was Deirdre at four o’clock” (94). In Lise’s part the author openly admits that there is no plot (see “Postmodernism”). In order to emphasize Lise’s inability to move, speak or think, Smith describes the young ill woman in a Postmodernist fragmented view from above through the lens of a camera: “Lying in the bed, in her room, in her flat, in a block of tenement flats six floors up, behind windows that looked out of to the walls of other tenements. Above and below her people were going on with lives” (8283). An external narrator recollects and comments the important items from the hotel where Lise used to work as a receptionist: “ The code on the door : 3243257 […] In six months Lise will be unable to remember this code. She will never need to remember it again” (114). When Lise wakes up in rare occasions she speculates about the appropriate adjectives that can describe her illness: “Visionary. Poetic. Revelatory. Mystic […] Being ill is revelatory. It reveals to you exactly what well people think of ill people” (99). This speculation evokes another character from the novel – Penny, trying to find appropriate adjectives to describe the hotel and its service. Nevertheless, the reason is different. Lise defines her illness as an indivisible part of her life, and she tries to find the pros of being ill. Penny,

33 however, is paid for publicising the hotel and her adjectives are pompous and empty: “It leaves nothing to be desired […] If you’re looking for the classic place, the ideal place, the flawless, the immaculate, no. Superior place. Transcendent, no” (130). In fact she does not write what she really thinks of the hotel: “The ceiling needed redone in the room; everything had pretended luxury and been slightly shabby” (130). Both Lise and Penny become empty, unimportant and useless for the reality. None of the female characters in Smith’s novels is a perfect woman (see “Postmodernism”) that used to be the character in realistic writings. Sara Wilby in Hotel World finds out that she is emotionally and sexually attracted by a girl from a watch shop but her desire is never fulfilled when her life ends in the bottom of a dumb waiter shaft. Her so far disregarded sister Clare suddenly becomes the only one who wishes to understand Sara’s passing away and she uses all possible tools to do so. Else rejects all the social workers’ offers to change her life and stays in the street that slowly kills her body with drugs and an unspecified pulmonary illness, while she occupies her mind with poetry, encyclopaedic knowledge and her memories. The ambitious and lonely Penny tries to adopt rather the masculine aspects to her character but the result is that her mind stays empty and confused. She is torn between her natural tendency to empathy to other women and the proclaimed masculine practicality and impersonality. Lise is described in two ways – as an ill person and that is not able to do anything; and there are the reflections of Lise as a receptionist, alive and surprising. From a certain point it can be perceived that her decision to show her empathy and hospitability towards Else is later punished by her disability as if any demonstration of humanity does not belong to this masculine world. While most of literary works are based on the polarity between the male and female world, the entire marginality of male characters shifts this novel into a different layer. Smith is able to show and work with the unsuspected depths of woman’s mind.

34 The Accidental

At first sight the structure of Smith’s novel The Accidental is logically divided into three parts tightly connected with the classical structure of the novel according to Aristotle: three parts named “The Beginning”, “The Middle” and “The End” seems to resemble and follow the ancient rules of dramas (see “Postmodernism”). The title of the first part “The Beginning” would prompt that the reader gains an overall outline of the plot, but this presumption is mistaken. After a closer view the reader does not feel engaged by a story bursting with unexpected situations. Instead, the author offers a vague description of a family and their problems hidden in the shadow. The reader is abandoned in uncertainty and doubts, as Smith does not explain the reasons or motives to the existing situations and relationships in the novel. The Postmodernist constructs that are strictly followed by the author seem to disable the recognition of important facts. On the contrary “The Beginning” in The Accidental offers several plots loosely connected by the relationships of the characters (see “Postmodernism”). The idea of family does not possess its sense and function in this novel. The members of the family are somehow united by the place where they live and by their membership to the same family. Their worlds hardly penetrate each other until Amber comes to enter all the existing plots. The crucial term embracing not only the story but also the structure of the novel is fragmentation. In a scientific point of view fragmentation is inevitable result of specialization: As more and more concepts, theories and models are developed it becomes impossible for any one scientist to keep informed about all of them. Researchers are forced to focus on smaller and smaller domains, becoming ever more specialized. This makes it more and more difficult for scientists from different domains to communicate. (“PostModern Fragmentation”) This movement towards fragmentation is employable not only in the scientific world but also applicable in other areas of art. “The same fragmentation can be seen in culture at large. Because of the media and the increased possibilities for travel, people come into contact with a much larger array of cultures, religions, ideologies, styles and fashions” (“PostModern Fragmentation”). In literature the fragmentation leads to the situation when authors “have done their best to sledgehammer these four literary

35 cornerstones [plot, character, setting and theme] into oblivion” (“Postmodernism and Literature”). The Postmodernist author manipulates with the structure of the narrative in order to escape “the wholeness and completion associated with traditional stories” (“Postmodernism and Literature”). In general fragmentation relates to all elements of the novel: the plot, setting, characters and theme. Smith shatters the layout of the novel The Accidental by its fragmentation according to the characters. The first part is subdivided into another four chapters where each member of the Smart family is given space to express their feelings, attitudes, fears and oddities. Four beginnings or rather four points of view on the present, the past and the future shape the first third of the novel. On the top of the fact that there are four beginnings there is another prebeginning or a kind of a prologue that introduces Amber a young woman who is a kind of a femme fatale of the novel; and how she was conceived in a town cinema called Alhambra. Although she is neither a relative nor a friend of the Smart family she influences and shatters their lives to a great extent. The central part of The Accidental called “The Middle” is distinguished by the Amber’s existence and her influence on the Smart family. Each member of the family is somehow concerned and fascinated by Amber and her attitudes towards life. The fascination is expressed differently according to the orientation of their characters. The most interesting chapter of “The Middle” section is Michael’s part, where Smith suddenly employs poetry, a completely different style from the rest of the novel to express Michael’s immediate feelings and desires (see “Postmodernism”). However, the poems are not written in a uniformed way, they differ from each other in style and layout. The ‘space’ between “The Middle” and “The End” is again filled by the cinema intermezzo presented by Amber. Then “The End” encloses the novel. There the Smart family returns from the country to their flat in the city. To their great surprise their flat is completely empty except for the answering machine laid on the floor as the only connection to the world around. The vision of an empty flat evokes the possibility of a rebirth, of a new beginning and each of the members accepts the situation in a various way. The most important change happens in Eve’s life, she decides to leave her family and tries to create her new identity in a place where her father lived. Amber again narrates the last words of the book. Smith uses similar time division to the novel The Accidental in her story book The Whole Story and Other Stories , namely in the story “Erosive”. Although in this

36 particular story Smith does not follow the usual time line, she rather plays with the order. After a short prologue there is a subchapter called “The Middle” followed by “The End” and finally “The Beginning” concludes the story at the end. The application of the traditional division (see “Postmodernism”) of the novel does not simplify the structure of The Accidental . On the contrary this illusory and graspable splitting disorient the reader who tends to believe the titles. Smith plays with the meaning and with the words themselves to ridicule the established rules of the novel. Not only Smith employs the intersections devoted to Amber and her puzzling existence, but she also further reuses the title words in the first sentences of every section. Although the title is printed separately on a white page and followed by another blank page, it becomes a part of the story: “The beginning…of things – when is it exactly?” (57), “The middle…of the dual carriageway right in front of the cars!” (107 109) and “The end…of the world” (213215). All these three beginnings of the three sections of The Accidental belong to Astrid’s chapters. The other characters’ chapters similarly contain the words from the section title in their introductory sentences. Smith also plays with the effect of surprise because the last sentence of a chapter is unfinished and seems to continue to the beginning of the following chapter but the two parts are not parts of one sentence: “Something has definitely i.e. begun…the beginning of this = the end of everything” (3536) or “She thinks her heart might combust right out of her chest id est the happiness…the middle of dinner with everybody there listening” (135 136). The order of the chapters in each section does not change and remains the same starting with Astrid, followed by her brother Magnus, their stepfather Michael and the last chapter always belongs to Eve, their mother. This unchanging order determines the importance of the characters for the author. The most significant positions are considered to be the first and the last, in The Accidental these positions are occupied by women (see “Postmodernism”). The men stay partly aside and although they achieve a noticeable qualitative change in their lives, they do not carry the main accent of the novel. Especially the fact that Eve radically changes her life and leaves her children astonishes the readers. The overall conception in The Accidental is probably more intelligible than in Hotel World. Ali Smith does not entirely follow the Postmodernist approach towards the features of the novel. The characters are clearly stated as the members of the Smart family, the place and the timing of the plot are more easily recognisable in The

37 Accidental than in Hotel World. The most remarkable attribute is that majority of events in The Accidental are closely associated with beginnings and endings. The first part of the novel “The Beginning” introduces the Smart family: their routines, oddities, fears, and obsessions. Astrid is bullied by her classmates, who take her mobile and throw it into a litterbin. Her mother pays all her attention to her writing. Magnus belongs among the best students in his school. He helps to make a fake photograph of a naked woman with the head of one of his schoolmate. The result is tragic. The girl commits suicide and all the boys who has taken part in the practical joke are being investigated. After holidays he will be informed with the results of the investigation. Michael, a university teacher, has always had love affairs with his female students but they soon have become a habit: “Ten years ago it had been romantic, inspiring, energizing […] Five years ago it had still been good […] Now […] on his office floor, [he] was worried about his spine” (70). Michael is Eve’s second husband, Astrid and Magnus are children from Eve’s first marriage. Her first husband left her after he fell in love with his colleague. She suffers from Michael’s affairs but pretends that she does not care about them. She has become a considerably successful writer. The motionless surface covering the disharmonious mosaic of characters is disturbed by Amber’s arrival. The novel could be possibly divided into four independent stories of the Smarts that are connected by the character of Amber. Amber is a stranger who comes in the middle of summer to the Smarts’ holiday house they rent. Nobody asks who she is and why she has come. The reader does not discover anything that would describe her thoughts, experiences and goals. Amber represents a typical Postmodernist character with no identity or psychological depth (Irving). At first sight Amber seems to appear purely ‘accidentally’ to shatter the surface of the family’s illusory happiness and forces the Smarts to awake from their stereotypes (see “Postmodernism”). However, the appearance of Amber is carefully elaborated. She functions as an activator of the family’s events from the first moment of her arrival. Smith uses Amber’s character to achieve a certain amount of tension in the plot. The continuous escalation of tension leads to a crisis of the existing relations, habits and values and eventually, to a change. Each of the novel’s characters undergoes an important modification that is connected with Amber. Endings and beginnings in The Accidental are connected in a neverending circle connected by Amber’s questionable existence. In the part called “The End” the Smart

38 family finds their flat completely empty: “There was nothing left. Not even a lost button […] Not even a lost paperclip down a crack in the wood. The only thing the thieves didn’t take was the answerphone” (218). The emptied flat has finished a certain phase in their lives and at the same time they face new challenges. Astrid and Magnus furnish their rooms according to their own taste and needs. Astrid begins to react to her classmates’ invectives and answers back. This new tactic brings her new friends: “…in fact Lorna Rose and Zelda and Rebecca have all made a kind of almost embarrassing effort at being friendly and Zelda keeps phoning her up at home…” (231). Astrid does not fix on the existence of her real father any more: “Also, the astonishing thing is, she doesn’t need her father’s letters any more…In fact it is a relief not to always have to be thinking about them or wondering what the story is or was” (232). Magnus is allowed to attend the school again after the investigation into a girl’s suicide was officially closed. He feels responsible for her death but learns to live with the burden of his guilt. The emptiness of their flat has helped him to carry the weight of it: “I think I liked it best when there was totally nothing” (257). Michael falls in love with Amber and starts writing poetry but she does not return his love and stays detached. Eve leaves her family and travels round the world to find new dimensions in her life. The first character in each section is Astrid, Eve’s younger child. Astrid tapes the village dawns every day: “Is the beginning different for everyone? Or do beginnings just keep stretching on forwards and forwards all day? Or maybe it is back and back they stretch” (8). Here Smith employs the symbol of the beginning: the dawn of a day taped day after day by Astrid’s video camera, the beginning of a person: “Or possibly the beginning is […] when you are in the womb […] the real beginning is when you are just forming into a person” (8). Astrid tries to capture the very moment of the right beginning, the birth of a new day. “But it is hard to know what moment exactly dawn is […] so does that mean that the beginning is something to do with being able to see?” (8). The probable reason why she tapes the dawns is that she has found and read her biological father’s letters to her mother and she remembers by heart the passage about dawns: “You are to me the Beginning of Beginnings […] If I had a film camera behind my eyes what I would do is film all the dawns of all the mornings of my life then give the finished film to you…” (124). The use of camera instead of Astrid’s own senses evokes one of the main Postmodernist aspects. The life seen through the camera is considered more real than reality (Irving). Astrid, the youngest of the family, tries to see the world through her digital camera. The camera compensates everything that Astrid is

39 missing: her biological father, the attention of mother, brother and the alwayspolite stepfather. Astrid comments on their rented house in the village and the boring holidays as a typical teenage girl who uses adult words to hide her superficiality: “Nothing happens here except a church and some ducks, and this house is an ultimate dump. It is substandard. Nothing is going to happen here all substandard summer” (8). She tapes dawns, dead animals, uneaten meals, and vandalized shops. The part devoted to Astrid reflects a young girl’s short attention span flitting from one topic to another and never placing too much importance on an event. After Amber arrives at their rented house, she seems to become Astrid’s close friend. They wander together in the country and there they tape interesting places. Amber listens to Astrid and her problems with being bullied at school and with her identity: “Astrid tells Amber about the mobile in the school litter bin with its rental still being paid and nobody knowing […] about her father Adam Berenski’s letters to her mother…” (124). Astrid is deeply shattered by the fact that during one of their trips Amber takes her camera and throws it from a bridge under the wheels of trucks. She is shocked and afraid of her parents’ reaction: “It is unbelievable. It is insane […] She will be in terrible trouble. It cost a fortune” (118119). Smith describes the little girl’s fear and feelings but she does not suggest any explanation for Amber’s behaviour. The presumable reason why Amber has destroyed Astrid’s camera is to make Astrid sense the real world around with her own body. Amber explains to her parents what has happened. But they do not believe her since the fact that she has destroyed Astrid’s camera is unbelievable: “Actually, Amber says as she helps herself to another slice of bread, it’s my fault. I didn’t like her carrying it around all the time. So I threw it off a motorway pedestrian bridge” (123). Amber is herself inexplicable character in the novel that does inexplicable things. Parents tend to prefer Astrid’s explanation that “it just fell off” (123). In the third section devoted to Astrid, Smith realistically depicts a child changing into a teenage girl. In less than an hour early in the morning Astrid recollects what has happened in the last few months. After the Smarts return home Astrid feels that she has an opportunity to begin a new life. The emptiness of the flat is compared to the first breath: “Getting home and walking in through the front door and it all being bare was like hearing yourself breathe for the first time” (217). Astrid recalls the feelings she has experienced with Amber in the summer. She remembers her courage and laugh they have shared together but she does not despair

40 that the summer has finished. On the contrary, at the age of thirteen she is able to think independently, to understand her own mind and to meditate about responsibility that “is different. It is about actually seeing, being there” (227). Astrid compares her mother’s departure to death or a disease: “It is the kind of thing, along with people’s parents breaking up, and grandparents who either die or have Alzheimer’s” (227). She deeply misses her mother: “the Smart Asteroid hurtling towards the earth getting closer and closer to the moment of impact and wherever her mother is in the world, she could wake up and look out of the window right now and see something coming down” (234). Amber becomes a catalyser and causes changes in the family life but not all the changes brings balance and satisfaction to the members of the family. The relationship between Astrid and her mother remains unsolved and unfulfilled. Astrid’s favourite word becomes ‘substandard’ and ‘i.e.’: “She shifts on the substandard bed. The substandard bed creaks loudly” (1112). Astrid mixes her memories, fragments of films and dramas and the experiences from the present: “She looks at the way the sun comes through the leaves above her head, i.e. the story of Icarus who had the wings his father made which the sun melted when he flew too close” (25). This relates to pastiche that belongs to the Postmodernism. In the last part when Astrid misses Amber her mother forbids Astrid even to mention Amber’s name. Consequently Astrid tries to hide her friend’s name into words and word puzzles containing the letters of Amber’s name and she starts a revolt against her mother typical of her age. Astrid changes the verb ‘am’ in order to contain a part of Amber’s name: “amb I supposed to be back by ten?” (222). She asks Magnus in front of her mother about “the kind of music called amb ient” (223). When the Smarts are returning home from their rented holiday house, Astrid says loud that she sees that “a cow was amb ling down a road” (223). Since her mother easily solves these little puzzles, Astrid decides to scheme out a new strategy. She observes an analogy of colours. Amber marks a certain shade of yellow colour and Astrid changes her name in a similar way to include a colour: “Ast red Smart” (223). The playful language that reflects the colours and Astrid’s mood implies one of the basic Postmodernist features of textual playfulness (Lewis). Astrid becomes fond of red colour, and persuades her mother to furnish her room with things in shades of red, her newly bought clothes are also all in red. Magnus compares his former existence to one of easy, flat, shining, quality hologram boys that were flat enough to slip away under a door (37 – 38). Now “the real

41 Magnus is too much. He is all bulk, big as a beached whale, big as a floundering clumsy giant” (38). This comparison of his previous self and the present one illustrates his frustration. For the first time in his life Magnus feels the burden of responsibility for somebody else’s life. His mind moves in vicious circles of selfaccusation. In The Accidental similarly as in Hotel World there is a motif of a pointless death of a young girl. In this novel it is Magnus’s classmate who has hanged herself. She did it in her bathroom and the fact that there is a bathroom next to his room irritates his mind. Magnus hardly ever enters this room: “He has kept his eyes shut when he absolutely had to come in here” (53). The result of his dark thoughts is the decision to commit suicide in the same way the girl did. Amber comes accidentally into the bathroom where Magnus is standing on the rim of the bath and offers him help to die: “When you’re ready I can knock myself against you here so you lose your balance” (55). At this moment Magnus realizes that he would do a foolish thing: “Sweat or crying, he doesn’t know which, falls from somewhere, hits his chest” (56). After that Amber washes him in the tub and makes him wear clean clothes. The bath and clean clothes could be understood not only as a physical cleanup, but also as a purification of his mind and a new beginning of his life as an adult. The arrival of Amber brings Magnus a new proportion of his life; he finally realizes that he is a man; with all the sexual desire it takes. Amber initiates him into sex and by having sex with him Amber influences Magnus to accept his body. One of the places where they make love is the old village church of which Amber has the key copied. “He will be able to remember this all his life, this losing his virginity to, learning all about it from, an older woman” (153). Smith places the act of a mortal sin into a holy and sacred place, into a church. She shocks the reader by the scandalous affair on purpose. The fact, that Smith elevates the sexual intercourse to the same level as faith in God refers to the Postmodernist refusal of faith, order and unity. The traditional approach towards the general social values is ruined (Irving). A parallel can be found when Amber ironically calls the young man St Magnus as she points to his rich spiritual world and his philosophical and scientific way of thinking. By calling Magnus a “ St ” Amber also refers to his determination to bear the guilt for the girl’s death and his unsuccessful attempt to commit the suicide. Magnus can be seen as a paraphrase to Jesus Christ who deliberately died for all mankind and their sins.

42 Amber ironically asks him to stop brooding in his thoughts: “I think I prefer you when you’re a bit darker […] Could you maybe dim yourself a bit?” (158). Magnus becomes a Postmodernist character, at first he seeks for clear order and regularity, but later he feels lost, empty and unhappy when he does not find any values. He expresses his disillusion of his failure. Magnus indirectly admits that this world is purely accidental with no rules to follow; the reality is not black or white, it is grey: “People are nothing but shadows, he says” (144). By this proclamation Magnus enters the adult world with its responsibilities and sexuality. Amber functions as a catalyser that accelerates the process of ageing. In the third section when the Smarts return home Magnus discovers a message on the answerphone “requesting that Eve and Michael urgently notify the school” (244). His selftorture begins again. At numerous sleepless nights Magnus visualizes what has happened since his arrival: “Milton [the head teacher] telling Eve and Michael: school investigation, recent tragic suicide, local press, implicated, necessary suspension while all proper investigations” (244). The tension of the few weeks is expressed and escalated by using the same sentence patterns: “How surprised Milton had been to see, of all names, Magnus’s name. How Milton literally couldn’t believe. How in this case ‘true’ was ‘relative’” (245). Later he receives a letter from school that “the matter officially closed” (236). This part of Magnus’s part lacks its climax (see “Postmodernism”). Instead of feeling completely relieved Magnus feels bitter and cheated, as he has expected punishment. Similarly to Astrid he wanders around the town, observes people around and speculates about his future. He compares his state of mind to a story about a group of men: “Does the man who’s seen the outside world go mad? Does he leave the cave, the only place he knew, and go somewhere else, exiled from his old friends and from the only life he’d known?” (249). The only fact he knows is that his life will never be the same as before. Finally he decides not to surrender to his despair and manages to open his heart to his sister, this decision brings him into a new period of his life: “Then he tells it all to Astrid through the open door, or as much of it as he knows and as much of it as he can, beginning at the beginning” (258). Both Astrid and Magnus have the power to make the important life change; Amber has encouraged them to accept the Postmodernist uncertainty and darkness as a regular part of their lives. The life has become fragmented and this mosaic represents the reality (see “Postmodernism”).

43 Magnus describes their crime in and explains how “They took her head. They fixed it on the other body. Then they sent it round everybody’s email. Then she killed herself ” (36). He describes the procedure step by step in a causal way. This method is typical for traditional approaches to prose. His way of thinking is confronted with the Postmodernist accidental view of reality. The sentences that describe the misdoing occur several times in the first part. Smith uses the device of repetition to depict the young man’s feeling of guilt. Short sentences escalate the tension of the story. At the end Magnus accepts the uncertainty, as he never knows who caused the girl’s death. The Postmodernism does not accept traditional division into good and evil, since the reality is shattered and fragmented by various points of view. Magnus is a thoughtful young man who observes the world around through mathematical and physical formulas. He feels safe when he is able to apply the constant and unchanging scientific knowledge to the new surprising experiences. After Magnus and Amber become lovers, his description of sexual intercourse reminds an application of a physical law: “Point of intersection. She made him lie on his back, she was perpendicular, rightangled. She added herself to him” (141142). Dr Michael Smart, a fortyyearold university teacher of literature whose favourite literary genre is Modernism, is deeply puzzled by Amber’s behaviour to him. Michael feels a kind of “newness” (58) when Amber comes to their rented family house: “His arms and legs were acting new to their sockets…Every muscle felt strange, new, good” (58). Unlike his stepson Magnus Michael does not suffer from lack of self confidence. He has always considered himself to be attractive to the opposite sex but Amber ignores him: “Who’d have believe it? That woman, Amber, had just pushed her plate away, pushed her chair back and […] left the room” (57). He feels declined and yet magnetized by Amber like “a moth to a flame! Dr Michael Smart had been reduced to cliché!” (59). Although an educated man, he feels weak, transparent and neglected in her presence: “She had entered him like he was water. Like he was a dictionary and she was a word he hadn’t known was in him. Or she had entered him more simply, like he was a door and she opened him, leaving him standing ajar as she walked straight in” (61). Michael enters quite a difficult period of life, the time when he begins to perceive his ageing. It is a completely new and painful experience for Michael to transform the quality of his life. He passes through a transformation from a young university teacher to a middleaged person and he begins to notice and understand the

44 hidden meaning of various literary pieces written by writers in their middle or old age: “But here was a new truth for Dr Michael Smart […] Now he had finally understand […] what it meant […] and every page he had ever read […] had been about. This” (76). The hidden meaning that Michael finds in the prose and poetry is the process of ageing. At the beginning of this part Michael compares the stereotypes of his life to prose: “Everything round them was silent, quite still, deceptively ordinary, deepdown prosaic – exactly the same as every night” (159). After Amber entered their life Michael realizes that “everything rhymed now […] world had become a sonnet sequence(y)” (159), and prose becomes poetry. Michael describes Amber in a series of poems and claims that he loves her deeply. Smith on purpose changes the writing style in the middle section dedicated to Michael. This change of style enables her to ridicule Michael’s desire and late passion. Her disdain is expressed not only through Amber’s deprecative behaviour, but also by employing of various poetry forms. Michael writes three poems that resemble the form of a sonnet. Each of the poems consists of fourteen lines with Shakespearean rhyme scheme (see “Postmodernism”). Nevertheless, Michael breaks the words and sentence structure in an effort to keep the exact number of lines and the number of syllables: “He glowed the moment he was looked at. He / glitzed like one firefly in the dark, then like / a whole architecture of fireworks / spelling her name and the words I love. Mich / ael sputtered out his crescendo in jerks” (165). At the ending of the second sonnet he admits Amber’s rejection: “But sonnets shouldn’t be so damned onesided. / They implied, at least, dialogue” and his loss of his selfconfidence: “He realized that he would never fuck her. / He realized that he would never have her. / He was a very ordinary bloke” (167). The third sonnet describes Michael’s shattered mind compared to broken mosaic. The impression is supported by fragmented sentences and incorrect punctuation: “on stones the there lay if as malevolent / bare feet for unnoticing – with a slam / eh ? what ? a pieces in man,in a meant / fragments,heart,rags skin instead of a .” (169). The fragmentation is further emphasized in a typographically odd poem that is finished by “A sonnet beautifully beating broke. / A whole arch it ecture was dark itself. / And after her, poetry overexposed” (171). He describes his doubts and frustration by numerous repetitions in a poem at the page 173: “Fuck poetry. Fuck books Fuck art. Fuck life. / Fuck Norfolk. Fuck his job and fuck his wife” (173).

45 The last part of the novel devoted to Michael finds him in a delicate situation, as a few students have accused him of sexual harassment and consequently the university has dismissed him. After months of desperation and uncertainty he begins to discover new values in his life. Surprisingly this situation does not destroy his personality. Michael feels a liberating change in his life and he enjoys walking “straight past the literature fiction literary criticism critical theory bays without even turning his head and go straight to the singular good monosyllabic sport section. Michael Smart, a real man at last” (260). Smith depicts Michael’s search for a new lifestyle in a light, casual and ironic way. Typically of Postmodernist writing the author does not offer the reader a detailed psychological portrait of Michael, but she haphazardly catches his thoughts as they occur. This method evokes the stream of consciousness way of writing but the deeper insight into his mind and the search for psychological reasons are missing. Michael’s ideas quickly alter their course and content but there is a dominant feeling that is omnipresent. Michael acknowledges loneliness and emptiness for the first time in his life: “He got out his mobile again. He scrolled up Eve’s number. Answerphone. Hello, he said. It’s me” (276). This Postmodernist approach highlights the fact that loneliness and emptiness are inseparable part of human life. When Michael recalls the summer months spent in the Norfolk village, he never mentions Amber’s name, but always refers to her indirectly. He accuses her of stealing from them everything including intimacy: “The innocent family, out of the goodness of its heart, takes her in, feeds her and offers her hospitality. Then the family wakes up next morning sleeping on the floor because she’s stolen everything out from under them. Beds, bowls, breakfasts. Everything” (270). The reason why they returned to an empty burgled flat is never explained in the novel. The inexplicability and accidentality belong among the main features of Postmodernism. By calling their family innocent he is probably not willing to accept his part of responsibility for the situation before Amber’s arrival. The reader is also puzzled by Michael’s sudden change of his attitude toward Amber when he recalls “how hard it was for him to deny her when she pressed him up against the wall of the house and dared him to kiss and how proud he’d been when he’d said no” (270271). Smith leaves the character to contradict both previous sections where Michael claims his passion and love to Amber. This denial of his feelings shatters his credibility and ridicules all he does or says. Michael has difficulty to adapt to the new situation and in order to lessen his feeling of being guilty he justifies what he has done.

46 One of the poems in Michael’s section in The Accidental contains interesting references to other poets and famous literary characters: “Did Shakespeare always become e.e. cummings? / Was the end always sonnetary ruin? / Did Shakespeare always turn into Don Juan?” (173). The last part of this section is written in regular full verse. This long poem views him from outside; it does not reflect his thoughts or emotions. The poem describes Michael’s doings directly in a linear timeline. His fruitless effort to have sex with Amber is depicted in an ironical way: “He swelled with false hope, like the Millennium Dome. / He fucked his wife instead. Not good enough. / Like the Millennium Dome, nobody’d come” (174). He attempts to cure his spleen by seducing a young girl from a supermarket: “He felt – awful. Her namebadge said ‘Miranda’. / Brave new world. He felt bad, utterly small […] Brave new world. Dr Michael Smart, depraved” (175176). The reference to Shakespeare’s The Tempest refers to the conception of sex as a sin. Miranda represents a naïve girl while Michael considers himself to be Caliban, the deformed monster from the play (“The Tempest”). But unlike Caliban Michael ‘succeeded’ as there was nobody to stop him. He also recalls the way Amber has reacted to his desire: “You don’t actually want the thing you want. / You only want what you can’t have. You want / it blindly” (177). The blend of prose and poetry forms in Michael’s middle section refers to another Postmodernist feature, the pastiche: To combine, or ‘paste’ together, multiple elements. In Postmodernist literature this can be homage to or a parody of past styles. It can be seen as a representation of the chaotic, pluralistic, or informationdrenched aspects of Postmodern society. It can be a combination of multiple genres to create a unique narrative or to comment on situations in Postmodernity. (“Postmodern Literature”) Similarly Lewis defines an important and typical Postmodernist mark: “Pastiche […] arises from the frustration that everything has been done before […] this explains why many contemporary novels borrow the clothes of different forms” (Lewis, 125 126). The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms defines pastiche as “a literary work composed from elements borrowed either from various other writers or from a particular earlier author”. The Encyclopedia of the Novel explains the term as “a form of allusion – a quotation from, or a reference to, the style of one or more originals, without necessarily comic, satirical, mocking, or even critical implications. The term comes

47 from painting, not music, and originally signifies a mélange of styles in a single work”. Michael’s part is most remarkable for using allusions and the technique of Postmodernist pastiche. Eve, Astrid and Magnus’s mother, is a successful writer in temporary crisis unable to begin her long expected novel: ”The beginning was keeping her awake. She by far preferred the edit, the end” (79). To strengthen the pressure and tension Smith applies a question – answer form for Eve’s section in the first part of the novel. Eve tortures herself with annoying questions: “ How and where was the book? Please don’t ask this” (84). When Amber comes to their house, Eve automatically assumes that she is one of Michael’s student mistresses. Eve feels threatened and annoyed by Amber’s presence: “The girl who had had the effrontery to turn up at their holiday house, eat their food, charm Eve’s children, tell what Eve suspected was one of the most blatant packs of lies she had ever witnessed anyone straightfacedly tell” (79). Eve has chosen this ‘swindle’ holiday family house as an escape from reality and her duties. She is not able to begin her writing, she feels empty and wornout, and therefore she spends all the time pretending work on the off laptop, or lying on the dirty floor of the summer garden house. The shed has become her shelter from work, from her responsibilities and herself. Eve suffers from a crisis that does not only interfere with her career but also touches her personality. She is unable to express her true emotions or disagreement: “Eve laughed, but to herself, so as not to wake him […] because she didn’t want to have to have sex again” (83). Her temporary fixed desire is to become “a woodlouse with a woodlouse’s responsibilities, a woodlouse’s talents” (85). Eve subconsciously refuses to accept reality, she even considers Amber’s remark that Magnus has tried to hang himself to be a good joke that perfectly describes “the special mourning period that being teenage was” (97). Smith uses Amber as a mediator whose presence enables the characters of the novel to partially reveal their personal histories. Amber’s arrival rouses memories of Eve’s childhood. She alone took care of her ill mother as her father lived in the USA with his new family. Her mother died when Eve was only fifteen years old. The years of her childhood spent at her mother’s bed taught her to hide her emotions. “Measured and calm. Eve by a window so many summers later was moved nearly to tears by her fifteenyearold self […] Grow up, for fuck sake, Eve (15) snorted at Eve (42)” (95). She also recollects her humiliation at the moment when she realized that Michael had had love affairs with many of his students: “ Because what was Eve? Eve was a house

48 and a garden and a foursquare family” (96). Eve questions herself why she is fond of Amber and her answers deal with sudden changes in the behaviour of the children. She even dares to admit that Amber tells the thought strikes her as shocking. This sudden recognition and feelings of fear and uncertainty are supported by the repetition of ‘what if’ questions: “ What if the girl had been telling the truth? What if the girl was in reality nothing to do with Michael? What if, all night, Eve had been maligning the girl…? ” (97). Smith uses the element of surprise in the middle section, which depicts Eve. Amber declares that she is able to tell important facts about the members of the family by holding an object “that had belonged to him or her for a considerable length of time” (180). At first Eve refuses to take part in the psychological game proposed by Amber but then she decides to cheat her. She brings an accidentally chosen stone from the garden and obtains a striking answer: “You’re an excellent fake, Amber said. Very well done. Top of the class. Aplus” (183). Eve offers to the reader her own opinion of Amber. She senses her charisma and compares her to an attractive medieval witch with “head bowed an bald as en egg, hands bound behind her back round the wooden post, thirsty and silenced and beautifully insane outside a medieval church with all the villagers jeering at her” (179). Later Eve admits to herself that she has never been able to forgive her first husband Adam that he left her. She feels disappointed and psychically harmed. This unhealed piece of her life negatively influences her emotions: “Magnus was a boy so like his father that Eve almost couldn’t bear to sit in the same room with him […] Astrid […] deserved to have no father, just as Eve had done most of her life” (183184). The other meeting with supernatural phenomenon happens at night when Eve wakes up and sees unknown people and her mother at her bed: “Hello, Eve said. Where have you been? Look, come on, I can’t. I’m dead, Eve’s mother said” (187). Similarly to Michael Eve tries to find her lost certainty by visiting the village church. While her husband does not enter the building where he hears that “people were clearly fucking in that church” (174), Eve comes inside and feels disappointed as “it smelt of disuse; it smelt a bit seedy” (189). The church is meant to symbolize certainty, belief and hope but none of them is able to find these values there. “For Postmodernists every society is in a state of constant change; there are no absolute values, only relative ones; nor are there any absolute truths” (“Religion & Ethics”).

49 All four characters of the novel come through important shifts in their lives influenced by Amber’s presence but Eve is the one who changes most. Smith positioned Eve on the last rank of the novel on purpose as Eve has placed herself on the last rank of the family (see “Postmodernism”), she constantly neglects her own emotions and wishes. Amber behaves to Eve rather rudely as if she wished to rouse her from her ordinary life: “Next you’ll be telling me the ‘story’ of giving birth to your babies and how hard it was or how easy or whatever, for fuck sake, Amber said” (196). Yet the first evening they spend together brings an unforgettable experience for Eve, because Amber does a surprising thing when leaving their house “the girl […] for no reason at all, had taken Eve by the shoulders and shaken her hard” (79). Eve is confused “as if, when she took her by the arms, the girl was going to, well, strange as it sounds, kiss her” (87). When Amber later massages her knee “Eve had the peculiar sensation she usually only had when she was in an aeroplane airbouncing in mid takeoff” (192). After Amber kisses Eve in her shed, Eve realizes something unique “as if she had been gifted with a new kind of vision” (202). Soon after this event Eve casts Amber out of the house, Amber reacts straightaway: “You are a dead person, Amber said” (203). The kiss may symbolize a new beginning, a kiss of Eve’s life, awakened by Amber, and although Eve feels shaken she does immediately recognize its meaning. The arrival into an empty flat intensifies her inner disturbance and deepens her inner emptiness. Eve unexpectedly decides to leave her family in order to search for her own identity. She leaves Great Britain and travels round the world. The description of her travels takes only a few lines in the story; the foreign countries have become a kind of a routine to Eve until she visits the poor African countries. The nearly automatic habit becomes totally inappropriate in a different setting: She’d drunk Coke in a hotel room in Rome. She’d drunk Coke in a bar overlooking a palace in Granada. She’d drunk Coke in a chalet bar up a mountain in Switzerland […] She’d been down a dirt track in Ethiopia in the middle of nowhere […] and the thin always smiling people […] given her everything they had […] they’d swept her into their ramshackle bar […] they’d presented her to the Coke machine […] until they eventually found enough money and coin after coin drop into the slot. (287288) Eve finally gets to the USA where she views a vision of her dead parents smiling at each other over the Grand Canyon: “Then both Eve’s parents, together at last, smiled

50 and waved goodbye like they were on holiday somewhere nice” (292). Their appearance leads her to the decision to search for her father’s other family. Eve also sends a message from the Grand Canyon to their home answer phone but the most important part of it stays unrecorded: “I’m about to throw my phone in […] And I just wanted to leave a message before I did. Lots of love” (289). The fact that Eve throws her mobile in the canyon and loses the last connection with her family relates to the Postmodernist view of the family as a unit that lost its role (Irving). Later on Eve arrives to the area where her father lived and “where I might have grown up” (293). Eve finds the farm and there she envisions her multi dimensional existences: “Out in dark on the ridge, silhouetted in the moonlight, were all the selves she could have been. They had linked their arms and were doing a kicky Scottish dance” (293). She finally stops thinking about the past and possible future and begins to notice the world around her and her own existence: “The dead weren’t the problem. The dead could look after themselves. Eve was beginning to grieve for the living” (294). The livings represent not only her but also the people who now live in the house of her father, her own family and her real future self. Eve decides to enter the house of her father and meet its inhabitants. At the very beginning the woman who lives there believes that Eve is their new ‘domestic help’ and Eve does not clarify the misunderstanding. She enjoys the new situation and lets the family think that her name is Steve: “Your name? she said. It’s Eve, Eve said […] And how do you take your coffee, Steve? Oh, Eve said. How nice. Lovely” (298). Eve seems to adopt a few elements of Amber’s behaviour, because she enters a strange house without explanation where she is offered to rent a room, and she lets the people believe their own presumptions. She also says to Rebecca, a girl of Astrid’s age that “Your mother is an absolute nightmare bitch from hell, Eve said. The book fell away from the girl’s face. The girl stared at Eve, openmouthed” (300). The family regards Eve to be one of their distant relatives that has come to the birthday party. Eve decides to accept her new role and she stays in the place and sleeps in her car like Amber did. Eve begins to live a new life filled with coincidences that are never explained. The fact that the reader is not supplied by the motifs indicates the Postmodernist approach towards the reality. Reality is not important (Irving). The Accidental in comparison with Hotel World seems to offer a more casual view of women and men. This effect is supported by the existence of the Smart family that is in the centre of the story. At a close view the people do not satisfy our

51 stereotyped perception of a family as a safe harbour in the stormy life (see “Postmodernism”). Astrid, the teenage girl is seeking for love but Eve, her mother, does not respond to her daughter’s longing. Magnus suffers not only for the burden of his supposed guilt but also for his physical resemblance with his biological father who left them years ago. His mother admits that she often has to suppress her aversion to her own son. Michael, the other male character in this novel, is Eve’s second husband, uses the family as a place to rest after work and as a place where he can prove to the society that he is a model father and a model husband. Finally Eve who is torn between the role of mother and wife and the role of a successful writer logically suffers from a personality crisis. When Amber literally attacks this scene, the storm begins inside the harbour. Amber is without question the least graspable character in the novel since she is a woman with no history and no future (see “Postmodernism”). She simply ‘exists’. The author puzzles the reader by hidden references and allegories about her life but simultaneously the reader is recommended not to believe them. Smith herself describes the appearance of Amber in The Accidental : ‘It’s about what happens when someone or something you don’t know comes into your life’, says the author, who retains her Highlands accent despite many years down South. ‘Do you think it’s going to kill you? Do you think it’s an angel? Do you want to kill it? Do you want to make love to it?’ ( Diva ) The character of Amber represents and carries several of Postmodernist features (see “Postmodernism”). She differs from the settled and framed members of the Smart family. Unlike majority of people Amber knows where her life has begun. Amber embodies the “fragmentation of the self (the unified, located subject), or a disappearance or flatness” (Lye). The first three pages of the novel explain her conception: “My mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the café of the town’s only cinema […] and my father, surprised, had slipped and grunted into her, presenting her with literally millions of possibilities, of which she chose only one” (1 2). Amber received her name after this cinema, Alhambra. Simultaneously with Amber’s conception Smith describes the cinema’s destruction by fire that happens five years later. The fire caused the impossibility to return to the cinema. The juxtaposition of a beginning of a new life and the depiction of the future destruction of the place where Amber was conceived corresponds with the conception of beginnings and endings that is present in The Accidental . The repeated reference to the place of

52 Amber’s conception reminds of the feature of paranoia in Postmodernist writing: “Postmodernist writing reflects paranoid anxieties in many ways, including: the distrust of fixity, of being circumscribed to any one particular place or identity” (“Postmodernism and Literature”). Although cinema is a ‘fixed’ place with an address, the purpose of its existence consists in presenting a fictive reality to the people via films. Similarly to the Postmodernist concept of paranoia Amber does not reveal any further details about herself or her personality, instead, she enumerates the qualities inherited and learned from her parents: “From my mother: grace under pressure; the uses of mystery; how to get what I want. From my father: how to disappear, how to not exist” (3). Amber remains consistent throughout the whole novel; she neither explains her intentions nor reasons of her doings. The reader is offered several versions about Amber’s early life, or rather lives. Amber explains nearly in an insane and muddled way in which the films she had seen influenced her perception of reality. Each sentence about her childhood is extracted from a film scenario: “We had a floating car […] I burned down a whole school […] Then I fell in with a couple of outlaws and did me some talking to the sun […] I had a farm in Africa” (104). Smith uses newspaper headlines and advertisement slogans to compound Amber’s life into a picturesque mosaic with no evident pattern, perhaps with the Postmodernist pattern of accidentality: “I was born in the year of supersonic, the era of the multistorey multivitamin multitonic, the highrise time of men with the technology and women who could be bionic…” (103). The medley of images is concluded by a brief image of a cinema reality that evokes the passing character of this place: “The kinematograph. The eidoloscope. The galloping tintypes. The silver screen. The flicks. The pictures […] Misty watercolour memories” (105). Amber compares her life to a game without rules: “But it’s all in the game and the way you play it […] I was born free” (105). This chaotic enumeration of images evokes the Postmodernist technique of playful fragmentation that forces the reader to endure the task of decoding the content of the plot. “The decoding of the Postmodern narrative can be achieved by searching the fractal details (that is the most fractured, ‘accidental’ and the ‘less significant’ iconic and narrative guidelines) which reconstruct […] the wrinkled pattern of the whole” (Manolescu, 265). Amber easily blends her fantasies with reality in order to mystify the people around her. Her explanation of the reason why she does not sleep inside Smarts’ house confuses the reader because Amber cannot be considered as a reliable narrator: “a girl of

53 seven […] stepped between two cars on to the road in front of her and Amber MacDonald’s car hit the child and the child died […] I decided […] I would never live in a place that could be called home again“ (101). Amber immediately disputes her own words: “ Well? she said. Do you believe me? ” (101). Later on in the novel Amber again disregards her own words when she does not remember killing a child in a car accident: “The child. Eve said. The child. The child you. You know. The accident. What child? Amber said. What accident?” (201). The existence “the multiplication of selfmade plots to counter the scheming of others” touches the Postmodernist paranoia concept (“Postmodernism and Literature”). Amber successfully hedges herself against any attempts to uncover the reasons of her occurrence in the novel. The last two pages of the novel which are dedicated to Amber return to the beginning. She again mentions Alhambra in the connection with her life. Nevertheless, there Amber adverts to the real Alhambra, the Moorish palace in Spain with its unsettled history. Alhambra represents the most notable things for Amber: “It’s a top oftherange but stillaffordable fivedoor sevenseater peoplecarrier […] It’s a palace in the sun. It’s a derelict old cinema packed with inflammable filmstock […] I’m everything you ever dreamed” (306). Amber represents an unreliable Postmodernist narrator who is not embedded in past and has no perspective to follow. Her character is a typical Postmodernist fictional construct that is added to the novel to confront the real characters. Smith is a “Postmodernist author [that] distrusts the wholeness and completion associated with traditional stories” (Lewis). Amber’s only role in the novel is to catalyse the destruction of the existing plots and construction of new recycled stories.

54 Conclusion The aim of this thesis was to analyse basic features that are attributed to Postmodernism and their application in Ali Smith’s novels. I was also interested to what extent Smith employs the Postmodernist components and what elements are particularly present in her writing. The critical responses to The Accidental and Hotel World are also reflected in my thesis in order to depict the inconsistent receptions of these novels. This thesis contains the general overview of Postmodernism, its roots and comparisons with Modernism and traditional schemes used in preModernist literature, the stereotyped questions of feminity and masculinity and the differences between the traditional and Postmodernist approach to the novel. The roles of the elements and structuring of the novel are depicted in detail. Ali Smith playfully works with time, the structuring of her novels, and the existence of other worlds. Smith does not satisfy the reader’s need of story; she corrupts the traditional division of the traditional novel. Although the author sections her novels into chapters ( Hotel World) , the titles of the chapters using grammatical tenses do not clarify the content. Instead, the grammatical expressions offer additional aspects of the narratives and the characters. In The Accidental Smith actually paraphrases the structuring according Aristotle (“The Beginning”, “The Middle”, “The End”) but the content contradicts with the titles since the parts are further fragmented into subchapters devoted to the characters of the novel. Smith uses both Postmodernist and realistic characters and she literary exploits the clashes between them. The Postmodernist approach to the playful perception of reality through images is described in the part devoted to Hotel World . Smith does not avoid the questions of sexuality; she depicts heterosexual and homosexual relationships, prostitution and a child abuse. The time in a Postmodernist novel does not represent a stable quality; Smith uses the time as a flexible and fragmented component of the narrative that the reader can sense together with the characters of the novels. The pastiche of styles and literary works that is the Postmodernist approach towards other literary pieces is also present in the novels. The text does not only enable the reader to perceive the story but it has its own important role; in a Postmodernist fiction text becomes a significant equivalent to other novel components. The shape of the text expresses moods and feelings of the characters or the passing of the time.

55 In Postmodernist prose the characters prefer to believe the conception of the world as a virtual reality. Media gain an unmentioned power over the lives of the characters in the novel. An Internet joke may provoke Magnus to commit suicide; a newspaper article with a photograph of Else’s properties fulfils her life expectations, and finally Astrid’s video camera serves as her own eye. In her novels Smith also touches the social aspects and contrasts in Hotel World where she juxtaposes Else and Penny. The absurdity of events rising from insensibility and the lack of interest of characters points at the Postmodernism and its understanding of the world around. The characters tend to search for something uncertain for uncertain reasons. The Postmodernist characters lose hope and the sense of their lives since the traditional social icons and values lack their late significance. The fact that Smith sees ghosts in her novels among living people corresponds the Postmodernist approach toward the reality and its doubtful and uncertain sense. The Postmodernism accepts the idea of worlds inside other worlds. The parallelism of worlds enters the pages especially in Hotel World . The most Postmodernist character is Amber in The Accidental in comparison with other rather realistic characters. She brings a change into the life of the Smart family, however, after she leaves the members of the family do not reach a different quality of their lives. Amber is a character without past or a goal that is used in the novel to bring a change. The Postmodernist characters are not interested in past or future; the present time becomes the only important factor. Her occurrence only raises questions connected with the society where we live; the ageing, importance of body and equality of physical and spiritual life, and the importance of identity are the most important. After Amber leaves the Smart family, Eve adopts her role and becomes the Postmodernist character in a new world. The difference between the characters in Hotel World and The Accidental lies in the existence of clashes between the realistic and the Postmodernist characters ( The Accidental ). In Hotel World there are no realistic characters that could reflect the distinction. Emptiness is other Postmodernist feature that strongly appears in both novels. All Smith’s characters suffer from their inner emptiness and this emptiness brings them to their emotional crises. At the end of The Accidental the Smart family return to their flat that is completely empty; the virtual emptiness becomes reality. Generally the basic Postmodernist element of fragmentation becomes a specific feature of Smith’s approach to her writing. She corrupts the structure of the novels into

56 several layers according to the characters and again reconstructs the plot into a mosaic with each segment carrying a bit of content. The most significant feature Ali Smith focuses on is the feminity and sexuality. Smith concentrates on women and their personal approach to their own selves. The feminine aspects mingle in both novels in all levels. Woman is in the centre of both novels and Smith consistently presents the female way of understanding of the reality around. The thesis has proved that Ali Smith’s novels Hotel World and The Accidental contain distinct Postmodernist features. Smith largely applies the Postmodernist methods of fragmentation of the structure and the narrative to create the mosaic composed of mininarratives.

57 Bibliography Smith, Ali. The Accidental . London: Penguin, 2005. Smith, Ali. Hotel World . London: Penguin, 2002. Smith, Ali. The Whole Story and Other Stories. New York: Random, 2004. Sim, Stuart. "Editor's Introduction." The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism . Ed. Stuart Sim. London: Routledge, 2001. Sim, Stuart. "Postmodernism and Philosophy." The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism . Ed. Stuart Sim. London: Routledge, 2001. Lewis, Berry. "Postmodernism and Literature." The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism . Ed. Stuart Sim. London: Routledge, 2001. Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers . New York: Vintage, 1991. Lodge, David: The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature. New York: Cornell UP, 1977. Federman, Raymond. Surfiction: Fiction Now and Tomorrow . Ed. Raymond Federman. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1975.

Electronic sources "20th century." Wikipedia. The free encyclopedia. . 9 Jul 2008 . Klages, Mary. "Postmodernism." 21 Apr 2003. 9 Jul 2008 . "Modernist literature." Wikipedia. The free encyclopedia. 10 Jul 2008 . “Postmodern literature.” Wikipedia. The free encyclopedia. 10 Jul 2008 . “Postmodern Philosophy.” Wikipedia. The free encyclopedia. 31 Jan 2009 . “Brave New World.” Wikipedia. The free encyclopedia. 24 Oct 2008 . Howells, Christina. "Modernism (literature)." Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia . 2008. 10 Jul 2008 .

58 Howells, Christina. "Postmodernism (literature)." Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2008 . 2008. 10 Jul 2008 Hill, Peder. "Elements of a Novel: Structure & Plot." [Weblog Learn the Elements of a Novel] 10 Jul 2008 . Witcombe, Christopher L. C. E.. "Modernism & Postmodernism." Modernism . 11 Jul 2008 . Taormina, Agatha. "Novels: Structure" 24 Apr 2006. 23 Jul 2008. . Baldick, Chris. "Pastiche." The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. 1990: Literature Online . Masaryk University Library. 12 Aug 2008 . Sage, Victor. "Parody and Pastiche." Encyclopedia of the Novel 1998: Literature Online . Masaryk University Library. 12 Aug 2008 . Blunden, Andy. "Grand Narrative." The Encyclopedia of Marxism . 2006. 28 Aug 2008 . Kershner, R. Brandon. "Modernism (The Modern Novel)." Encyclopedia of the Novel 1998: Literature Online . Masaryk University Library. 21 Sep 2008 . Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds. “Postmodernism And The Novel.” Encyclopedia of the Novel 1998: Literature Online . Masaryk University Library. 21 Sep 2008 . Margolin, Uri. “Character (Types of Characters and Theories about Characters in Novels).” Encyclopedia of the Novel 1998: Literature Online . Masaryk University Library. 22 Sep 2008 .

59 Hassan, Ihab. "Toward a Concept of Postmodernism." Dr Maria Elena Buzsek . 1987. 30 Oct 2008 . "Ghost Story." Encarta® World English Dictionary . 2007. Microsoft Corporation. 8 Nov 2008 . "Muriel Spark, Novelist Who Wrote 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,' Dies at 88." The New York Times 16 Apr 2006 8 Nov 2008 . Flanagan, Mark. "Ali Smith." About.com: Contemporary Literature . The New York Times Company. 17 Nov 2008 . "Ali Smith." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia . 2008. Wikipedia Foundation. 17 Nov 2008 . “An Online Interview with Ali Smith.” Encompass Culture. May 2004. 17 Nov 2008 . Thursfield, Amanda. "Ali Smith: Critical Perspective." Contemporary Writers . 2003. British Council. 17 Nov 2008 . Poole, Steven. "The Accidental by Ali Smith." The Guardian 11 June 2005 24 Nov 2008 . Caldwell. Gail. "Perfect stranger," The Boston Globe 22 Jan 2006. The New York Times Company. 24 Nov 2008 Kakutani. Michiko. "There Enters a Stranger, and a Family Finds Its Prism," The New York Times 27 Jan 2006. The New York Times Company. 24 Nov 2008 Turrentine. Jeff. "When a Stranger Calls," Washington Post 26 Feb 2006. The Washington Post Company. 24 Nov 2008 Lye, John. "Some Attributes of PostModernist Literature." [Weblog Department of English Language and Literature] 30 April 2008. 4 Dec 2008 .

60 Mepham, John. "Narratives of Postmodernism." Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction . Ed. Edmund Smyth. London: Batsford, 1991. "The Tempest." Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia . 2008. Wikipedia Foundation. 17 Nov 2008 . "BBC: Religion & Ethics," Postmodernism 17 May 2006. 8 Jan 2009 Manolescu, Ion. "Visual Techniques In Postmodern Literature. Towards An Interdisciplinary Approach Of Fictional Perspective ." 011996 241276. 11 Jan 2009 . Heylighen, F.. "PostModern Fragmentation." Principia Cybernetica Web . 1999. 26 Jan 2009 . “Past tense.” Wikipedia. The free encyclopedia. 31 Jan 2009 . "Future in the Past." English Page . 31 Jan 2009 . "Historic Present Definition." Encarta® World English Dictionary . 2009. 31 Jan 2009 . “Narrative Mode.” Wikipedia. The free encyclopedia. 31 Jan 2009 . "Future Conditionals." English Page . 6 Feb 2009 . “Perfect aspect.” Wikipedia. The free encyclopedia. 6 Feb 2009 . "New Novel." Encyclopædia Britannica . 2009. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 07 Feb. 2009 . Irving, Martin. "The PoMo Page: Postmodern, Postmodernism, Postmodernity." 2003. 13 Feb 2009 . "Life for Communication." 2008. 13 Feb 2009 . Sandler , Helen. "Ali Smith I Like Women's Writing!." Diva: Lesbian Magazine 14 Feb 2009 . Nagy, Ladislav. "Ali Smith: Hotel World." iLiteratura 17 May 2005. 14 Feb 2009 .

61 Resumé Práce analyzuje dva romány britské autorky skotského původu Ali Smith. Jedná se o romány The Accidental a Hotel World. V úvodu se zabývá stručným seznámením s autorkou, která dosud není v českých literárních kruzích příliš známá. Zaměřuje se na reakce literárních kritiků na obsah děl a jejich nejednoznačné přijetí literární veřejností. Následující kapitola zevrubně popisuje základní znaky postmoderní literatury s porovnáním s modernismem a s tradičním pojetím románové struktury. V kapitolách nazvaných podle obou románů se zabývá vlastní analýzou děl s přihlédnutím k sekundárním zdrojům. V analýze se především zaměřuje na vyhledávání rysů postmodernismu v próze Ali Smith.

Resumé This thesis analyses two novels written by Ali Smith, The Accidental and Hotel World. The introduction deals with the author herself, her life, work and the responses of critics to her novels. Ali Smith does not belong among the renowned authors in the Czech literary scene. Only her novel Hotel World was translated into Czech as Hotel Svět . The following chapter called Postmodernism introduces the basic features of this movement in comparison with Modernism and the traditional schemes of the realistic novel. The analyses of the novels are provided in the chapter titled after the novels. The analyses are focused primarily on the typical Postmodernist features in the novels.

62